Margot At The Wedding - Review
Review by Jack Foley
NOAH Baumbach blew pretty much everyone away with his last film The Squid & The Whale – a biting look at fractured family relationships as seen through the eyes of two children.
He explores similar themes again in Margot At The Wedding, an altogether more frustrating experience that’s likely to test the patience of a saint.
Margot Zeller (Nicole Kidman) is a self-obsessed novelist who decides to take her son Claude (Zane Pais) to her sister Pauline’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) seaside home just days before she weds frustrated artist Malcolm (Jack Black). What begins as a breezy family get together soon turns into something more heated, however, as past rivalries and demons surface and Margot upsets just about everyone with her selfishness and need for control.
The biggest problem with Baumbach’s latest is that he fails to deliver a character that’s worth sympathising with, which makes the journey of just about everyone involved an excruciatingly painful one to endure despite the [very] odd moments of humour.
Kidman, especially, is an obnoxious creation – a bad mother and terrible sister who has the ability to upset any situation with her bitchy comments and need for control. But Leigh and Black – although initially worth rooting for – also prove themselves to be frustratingly mixed up creations with a capacity for self-destruction that stretches credibility.
Pais, meanwhile, isn’t afforded the same sort of screen-time that Owen Kline and Jesse Eisenberg were in The Squid & The Whale to really make his character stand out.
What’s left is a series of family showdowns that eventually give rise to the inevitable revelations about abusive upbringings. But even these fail to carry the emotional clout audiences might have been anticipating because of the ambivalent way Baumbach’s characters tackle them.
Come the drawn out and self-consciously ambiguous ending, viewers are likely to have given up completely, especially since Margot proves conclusively that she’s a character beyond redemption.
Baumbach’s film, meanwhile, ends up feeling like a pretentious, arty mess that completely mishandles the many difficult issues it seeks to explore. For viewers, it’s an ordeal that’s best left ignored.
Certificate: 15
Running time: 93mins
UK Release Date: February 29, 2008