Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Everything about Baumbach's sixth film, Margot at the Wedding points to his again channeling his childhood and clipping those autobiographical coupons ("I always view life as material for a movie," he has said) for use in his script, much as he did in the acclaimed The Squid and the Whale.
There is Margot's main character, Margot Zeller (Nicole Kidman), a writer of short stories, as well as historical novelist Dick Koosman (Ciaran Hinds), whose name says it all and who acts out with as much ego and punishing entitlement as the late Norman Mailer. Sure, we'll compare the two movies and look for more clues about Baumbach's youthful life, raised as he was by novelist and film critics Jonathan Baumbach and Georgia Brown."
Margot returns to her family's seaside home, accompanied by her sexless, pubescent son Claude (Zane Pais), to witness her sister's wedding to (in Margot's eyes) a less than deserving slacker named Malcolm (Jack Black). Margot has long been estranged from Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) for the transgression of stealing from Pauline's life to fuel her art, thus effectively ending Pauline's first marriage (upon publication). That, however, is another screenplay in itself. Margot is a mess; a bossy, neurotic changeling whose officious manner and competitive, argumentative nature cloaks one seriously insecure lost soul.
All of this familial disharmony would have been intellectually insufferable without the talents of Kidman and Jason Leigh in the leads. Kidman is in virtually every scene of the film and she makes Margot the kind of fascinating train wreck that leads admirers to finally pray for a swift death. She's hot and cold, childish and pragmatic and feels she has the right to betray any confidence, but can't accept it happening to her. Her skin is as thin as parchment and Kidman is fascinating to watch; she turns on a dime and gives a performance that can only remind us of her early potential in To Die For.
Jason Leigh, Baumbach's wife, has the harder role and she plays an earth muffin who is the tail on her sister's two-headed coin; she's an enabler who can't say no and who continues to believe that old wounds and hurts can heal and that tomorrow will be better, especially since time is running out. Both women make all they can from two difficult characters who need, as much as distrust, each other.
Yet there's a restlessness about Margot... that feels like searching more than replaying old tapes and in some ways, this is a better, more yearning movie than Squid because it, despite its unpleasant lead character and superfluously messy asides and ambiguity, achieves answering its wayward yet essential life questions.
Baumbach, in a way, has made a Dogme 95 movie (of which Kidman must reflect on her role in Lars von Trier's Dogville), taking the literal and the bleak and stark realities of life and light and put them up there for people to question. This may be his Interiors, which, like Woody Allen's far more meticulous and studiously sterile look at writing and familial dysfunction, was a pilfering of his idol - Ingmar Bergman's - savage exhumations of marital and creative relationships, after coming off the successful one-two punch of the romantic comedies Annie Hall and Manhattan.
Margot at the Wedding may be a schematic mess, but if you fight the usual narrative arcs and screenplay format and all the pat formula we've come to expect from movies, makes a rare thing - emotional, not literal, sense. Unfinished business will never be cleared away and the filler that Baumbach packs into his film - lost dogs, redneck neighbors, dead trees, Lolita-like temptations (Halley Feiffer) and sad husbands (John Turturro) - are superfluous. They're the unwelcome dinner guests in aspic in a movie about sisters and children picking their way through harsh, blinding confrontations of blame, memory scabs, settling, lost moments and aging.
Though the film focuses on Margot, if we look at everything that happens through Claude's eyes-and-innocent-observers-heart we find that Baumbach has pulled off a tricky sleight-of-hand. The film's abstraction and seemingly absent-minded segues and ill-rhythm make so much sense seen through the eyes of a child on the verge of adulthood and in the process of saying goodbye but yet still clinging to a childhood no matter how imperfect, is blinded by his mother's incessant needs and reluctance to let go. Nice purge, Baumbach.