Margot at the Wedding Review
By David Kempler
Margot at the precipice of acceptable social behavior
It was with great anticipation that I went to attend a showing of "Margot at the Wedding". Ever since I saw "The Squid and the Whale" I was curious as to what writer/director Noah Baumbach would deliver the next time around. "The Squid and the Whale" was an outstanding presentation of very real characters that flowed into an intricate examination of a family. This time around, Baumbach attempts a similar undertaking with a spotty amount of success.
In this tale, the family consists primarily of two sisters, Margot (Nicole Kidman) and Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), Pauline's fiancée, Malcolm (Jack Black), and Margot's son, Claude, (Zane Pais). Everyone is gathering at Pauline's house for her upcoming wedding. Malcolm is a coarse but harmless-appearing fellow full of false bravado and little monetary accomplishment. He shares the house with Pauline but it is hard to ascertain what it is that has brought them together or what if anything they have in common. Margot has a fantastic ability to make people feel badly about themselves without even trying and without any self-awareness that her words are weapons against those she supposedly loves. She displays this talent non-stop.
For the first half of the film everything fires on all cylinders. The interaction between characters and the dialog rings perfect. As the wedding preparations begin to fall apart so does the film. What was once a flawlessly flowing story becomes a stilted stop and start adventure. The reasons for the way the characters behave are never fleshed out, turning everything into an exercise of weird behaviors that are amusing and interesting to watch but ultimately frustrating to the audience.
All stories of odd people need a centerpiece of normalcy from which they can be contrasted. There is only one such person in this story and it is Margot's husband, Jim (John Turtorro). Unfortunately, Jim is on screen for about a total of ten minutes. It is only through his eyes we might be able to make some sense of all of this craziness but his ten minutes are totally wasted on a scene to further expose just how nuts Margot really is. In the final scene Margot either strives towards normalcy or is just committing another random act with no thought behind it. By then we really no longer care.
