Review of Margot at the Wedding (2007) by Nathália P — 06 Jan 2009

The title character, played in a very adept change of pace by Nicole Kidman, is a flourishing but overanxious writer who brings her 11-year-old son played by Zane Pais to spend a weekend going to see her hands-off sister, played by the outstanding Jennifer Jason Leigh, for her wedding to Jack Black, who is pitch-perfect and pathetically funny as an egotistical loser under the delusion that he has artistic gifts. Margot objects to her sister's selection of a fiancé, which instigates a weather-beaten hostility between the two sisters.

Noah Baumbach was jotting down a written record of his own family. As with his fantastic earlier work The Squid and the Whale and now with his equivalent and at the same time transcendent Margot at the Wedding, he puts a smart but upsetting family up close and disgusts himself with little blemishes of dirt and grime that add up to a little too much. Sure enough, there is no cause to be positive the family in either movie is informed by his own. Nevertheless distinguishing the measure of fluency and acquaintance, no incentive not to, either. Moreover, in this Americana-blended Bergmanesque psychodrama, the title character is blamed for hoarding each family pain, shame and awkwardness for reuse in her short stories.

It is on no account clarified why the two sisters haven't been on speaking terms, but that is the kind of touch that beautifies a film like this. I have had several friends who have drifted because of some indescribable, abstract apprehension or resentment. Haven't you? Haven't most of us? And because these two characters are sisters, they are even closer to each other, able to be more easily aggravated by faults that perhaps only they can see in one another. Maybe they match each other so neither one has yet been able to outdo the other. Every one of their life decisions appear as if premeditated as tell-offs to each other. They've used up a life mutually trying to rest in the same rank and force the other gone. There's no downright dire incident some time ago, merely the shared sense that each imagines themselves as better off without the other.

They're harshly straightforward with each other, in particular in talks about their sex appeal. What does it do to a woman when she consumes years giving the cold shoulder to men who want to have sex with her, and slowly but surely becomes aware that there's no one left to reject?

A lot of of their dialogue goes on in the presence of their kids, who seem to be learning to develop into the next age group of dysfunctionality. They are vocal, expressive, self- centered, egocentric, narcissistic, aloof and nitpicky. They've never felt an emotion they couldn't laugh at due to their neurotically critical spirits.

This insightful, dryly funny, cynically heartfelt modern model, which, alas, only made a little over two million worldwide, may well not be built upon Baumbach's personal family, but it exhibits a approach to families that aggregates his persnickety outlook on the average person. He is fascinated with people's deepest and most averting faults. All of its members are engaged in a mutual process of biting each other's backs.