Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding has grown on me. The first time I saw it back in November I admit to being stunned more than a bit senseless. It was so aggressively narcissistic, so brutishly desolate, and trying to spend 90-plus minutes with its characters wasn't exactly easy.

But even then I couldn't help but notice how remarkably well crated it was and how shockingly funny the humor in it could be. It was also brilliantly acted by its two female leads Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh, both of whom probably deserved Oscar consideration in both the lead and supporting categories. More, as bleak and as dark and as gruesome it got I simply could not take my eyes off of it, and by the time it was over even though I'd been brutally slapped senseless I still had to admit this was a picture made by a daring and dynamic filmmaker close to the top of his game.

Able to sit back and watch it a second time at home, I still hold with my original thought that with each successive work starting with Kicking and Screaming through The Squid and the Whale and now culminating with this Baumbach's point of view has gotten bleaker, strident and altogether much more difficult to endure. I also maintain my opinion that Jack Black is completely wrong here, completely unbelievable during his all-important third act breakdown making much of the subsequent action that much more difficult to rationalize.

Yet sprawled out on my couch I caught far more of the tale's magnificent nuances then I did in the theater. There is a potent honesty to all of this familial pabulum that's deeply effective. The story of two New England sisters, Margot (Kidman) and Pauline (Jason Leigh), reuniting for the latter's wedding to an out-of-work oaf (Black) in the family's former seaside home, the movie's singularity of vision is astonishing. The things these broken individuals discuss are vicious and cutting, all of them slicing into one another with a disassociated deadpan relish that's highly uncomforting.

Baumbach dives headfirst into all of it with a relish and a gusto that's shockingly mesmerizing. His script pares these women like grapefruits, the odd taste their journey leaves a bitterly potent reminder of just how much even the closest sibling relationships can sometimes go infuriatingly awry. These people poke and prod and pinch and fidget and fight and flutter around one another like fruit flies fighting over a rotting banana peel, and the more time I spent with them the happier I was my immediate family wasn't a darn thing like them.

Then there are the performances. From Kidman's icy virtuosity for refusing to back down from any of Margot's destructive flaws, to Jason Leigh's magnificently complicated turmoil trying to comprehend why it is she continues to love and confide in a sister who refuses to love herself (let alone those around her), these women are extraordinary. Young newcomer Zane Pais is also quite good as Margot's questioning son Claude, holding his own with these two actresses with both skill and dexterity which belie his age.

Ultimately the film ends on a brilliant coda of indecisive decisiveness (an oxymoron, I know) that left me feeling bruised, battered and exhilarated all at the same time. As for the DVD, Paramount Vantage has gone the bare-bones route giving viewers nothing more than a collection of trailers and a marginally interesting interview featurette between Baumbach and Jason Leigh (his wife in the real world). While all this probably doesn't add up to enough for a purchase, as a rental Margot at the Wedding is an intriguing original viewers looking for something interesting, challenging and different should probably say I do to.