Watching Noah Baumbach’s newest film, Margot at the Wedding, evokes some of the same feelings a kid has while growing up with parents who should have divorced long ago. The constant bickering leaves you irritated and desperately seeking some sort of escape. Sometimes however, you find yourself wanting to intervene but can never find the strength to do so. Then, when it’s all over, you feel even more frustrated at how childish they’ve become.
Margot (Nicole Kidman) travels across New York for her sister’s marriage. Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and her future husband Malcolm (Jack Black) plan on having the ceremony in their backyard under a rather large tree, which itself has been the subject of a conflict between them and their neighbors, who claim the tree’s roots are ruining their yard.
Something happened between Pauline and Margot many years ago that caused them to stop speaking to each other. It’s never really tackled here but this visit is also a sort of reunion where the incident is never a focal point of conversation. They simply move past it without bringing it up to much or pointing blame at one another. So we never learn the actual details of it but after spending about 20 minutes with them on screen, it isn’t difficult to see how such a thing could happen.
Kidman’s performance as Margot, the pseudo-celebrity in the writing world, is almost exhausting to watch. The character is honest about every little thing, spoiled in certain areas, and gives little consideration to other people’s feelings. She treats everyone as equals and doesn’t take into account if you’re family or not. Her son Claude (Zane Pais) seems more like her best friend and it’s this dynamic that makes him a touch different than other kids.
Writer/director Baumbach has made it his specialty to deal with family relationships in crisis. His last film, The Squid and the Whale (2005), was a wonderful look into the life of a family going through a divorce. The approach there was pensive, whereas here, the aesthetics of the film are as chaotic as the characters themselves, as if the editor tried to mimic the style of the French New Wave movement without paying attention to the theoretical reasoning behind it.
The film flows together like a series of moments without enough thread to hold them together. Emotionally important sequences often feel cut short, giving the viewer no real time (or reason) to involve themselves in the action. The principle trio of players (Kidman, Black, and Leigh) give performances that are all better than the characters themselves. Margot at the Wedding is the equivalent to involving yourself into a pointless argument that never ends.
