Margot at the Wedding Review
by [email protected] (dnb AT dca DOT net)November 21st, 2007
MARGOT AT THE WEDDING
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 2007 David N. Butterworth
*1/2 (out of ****)
How about this for a revised tagline: "If you loved "The Squid and the Whale" you'll hate "Margot at the Wedding"!"
I did (and I did).
Margot and her floppy raspberry felt hat (and her son Claude, who's at that puffy adolescent age when he could easily be mistaken for a Claudette) hop on a Long Island ferry to visit Margot's free-spirited sister Pauline, to whom Margot hasn't spoken in over a year (it becomes apparent why rather quickly; free-spirited means Pauline swears a lot and doesn't button her pajama top much, not that those are necessarily the reasons). Actually everyone swears a lot in "Margot at the Wedding"; you know there'll be white wine and Volvos and cruel betrayals involved somewhere.
Pauline's about to exchange vows with a letter-writing musician wannabe cum unemployed abstract painter, Malcolm, who recently shaved off his beard but kept the moustache--"it's meant to be funny," Malcolm explains of his often-repeated tale, a fitting appraisal of Noah Baumbach's latest film. But there's many a slip 'twixt "meant to be" and "is" and the writer/director's follow-up to the sublime "'Squid'" is a surprising shock to those rare functional family values after that fine, Oscar(r)-nominated film.
For one thing "Margot'" is murky as all get out, both emotionally and cinematography-wise. "Why doesnâeTMt somebody turn a light on?" whispered the stranger sitting next to me to her companion. All of the interiors are under-lit; apparently cameraman Harris Savides "used old lenses and shot mostly in natural light to get the dim, ominous look of the film" but the end result is that the players are hardly visible a lot of the time and we're (therefore) forced to focus on their words, which are ugly and mean. As are the characters themselves, mostly, but we can't always see them half the time, so that helps. Secrets are shared, and subsequently spilled, with aplomb (like a pregnancy). Margot thinks Malcolm isn't good enough for her sister and hates to get presents she already has (like slippers). Pauline thinks the only reason Margot's there at all is because the man she's currently sleeping with lives just up the road. Margot's husband Jim, with whom she's not sleeping, shows up, even though she asked him not to. A Vogler (backwoods neighbor) bites Claude on the cheek. Margot climbs a tree. Malcolm finds a trotter in the trash. Autism and Bell's palsy get a tableside look-in.
There is a modicum of humor to be found in all this but it's a mere spattering, an uneasy side effect of an overworked canvas. Jack Black (as Malcolm) provides most of it, and emerges triumphant alongside Nicole Kidman (Margot) and Jennifer Jason Leigh (Pauline), who are stifled by their characters' finite inaffability. Youngsters Zane Pais (Claude) and Flora Cross (as cousin Ingrid) give decent accountings but it's nothing compared to the exemplary work of the two boys in Baumbach's previous film. John Turturro plays Jim.
It must have been a considerable challenge to make a sibling reunion "dramedy" less palatable than "The Family Stone" but Baumbach seems to have pulled it off.
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David N. Butterworth
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