December 01, 2007

Margot at the Wedding

Squid vs. Whale

Some people grow more peaceful and contemplative with age. Some, like Maude from Harold and Maude, get all carpe diem, bounding around and living out their last days with as much boisterous fun as they can muster. If director Noah Baumbach’s latest film Margot at the Wedding is any indication of his personal journey, it’s clear that his aging process will follow another common path: pessimism, and downright grumpification.

At his best, Baumbach’s films are honest, biting views of the many phases of growing up. His 1995 film Kicking and Screaming was, for this reviewer, a close-to-home look at recent college graduates staring down fear and desperation by clinging to remnants of their college experience. It was smart and funny, with moments of heartache but mostly lighthearted vignettes, like comic sketches. More recently, last year’s The Squid and the Whale, a divorce story set in a bookish Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1980s, portrayed upper-middle-class intellectuals, the strains of aging and marital strife, and the most awkward parts of puberty with a black humor and angst that fit the subject matter perfectly. Now, he’s made Margot at the Wedding, which takes on similar subjects as the first two— the difficulties of being a teenager, of moving on, of learning to love our imperfect families— but with broad, angry brushstrokes that can barely be made out as humor. It’s The Squid and the Whale, without any of the rays of hope or love which kept us interested in the dysfunctional family at its center. It’s black comedy without the comedy.

Nicole Kidman plays Margot, a New York writer with severe emotional problems. If that diagnosis sounds vague, it’s because that’s as thorough an explanation as we get for her outrageous behavior throughout the movie. She’s a narcissist, a hypocrite, a blabbermouth, a bit of a pothead, and a terrible mother to her adolescent son Claude (Zane Pais). The wedding in question is for Margot’s sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh, who’s married to Baumbach in real life), and Malcolm, a lackluster failing musician named played by Jack Black. Margot and Claude visit the soon-to-be-couple a few days before the wedding at the house where Margot and Pauline grew up; misery ensues.

Baumbachian cruelty is especially cruel, because everyone who delivers it holds an advanced degree and an impressive vocabulary. The characters in Margot at the Wedding don’t insult each other; they offer professional opinions of their loved ones’ deepest flaws. This may be tolerable between a smarty-pants husband and wife in The Squid and the Whale, but it doesn’t seem fair when Kidman’s character observes her son with blatant disappointment and tells him how much he’s changed recently. Margot’s mothering, which makes Medea look like Carol Brady, was what I found most painful to watch. In scenes like this one, or one in which Margot bullies Claude about having a crush on his buxom babysitter, whom she calls “insufferable,” I found myself waiting— with a clenched jaw— for a last-second softening of her features, or any form of apology, even an insincere one. But there was no mercy, for me or for Claude.

In Margot at the Wedding, the most sympathetic characters are the people who get beat up on the most, which makes the mother-son dynamic especially hard to swallow. Baumbach shows us Claude’s world by dipping his toe into the teenage boy coming-of-age stuff which was so disturbing and touching in The Squid and the Whale, only to subject us to the cruel realities of the outside world— not only his mother, but a bout of physical torture from the redneck kid next door. Where coming of age served a clear purpose in Baumbach’s previous movie, in this case the tortuous scenes feel like salt in our wounds.

Margot’s husband, whom she plans to divorce, is another victim of her cold shoulder. He’s played by a meek John Turturro (in case you’re wondering, yes, Kidman and Turturro are the most thoroughly mismatched onscreen couple I have ever seen) in a five minute cameo which gives him enough time to give Margot a gift, get criticized for it, and watch his wife get stoned as he tried to speak to her seriously about the state of their relationship. Why all the vitriol for such sweet people? Margot has at her disposal her lover Dick (Ciarán Hinds), a snake-oil salesman with a nice car; and Malcolm, a doofus who obliviously sketches erotic drawings in the presence of kids. Margot and Pauline offhandedly reference their abusive father, but the issue is skated over so quickly that we can’t possibly be expected to buy it as the reason for Margot’s.

The presence of Jack Black alone makes the humorlessness of Margot at the Wedding that much more grotesque. I’ve never been a big fan of Black (with the exception of his aptly cast role as a boorish music snob in High Fidelity), but I was thankful for his innocent, straight-talking boneheadedness, the most down-to-earth element in a talky movie about smart people treating each other cruelly. That is, until the climax, when the portly, snarky comedian cries (and cries and cries). I suddenly understood why man don’t like seeing women weep: it was an unholy, unbearable sight, as if the film’s bleakness finally got to him, and he was pleading for relief.

Baumbach does offer a kind of reconciliation at the end— and I do mean the end: things are looking pretty dismal until the last two minutes, tops. But Margot’s sudden change of heart hardly makes up for two hours of heartlessness. If anything, it presents another possible diagnosis: manic-depression. Who knows what she’ll do once the closing credits are rolling.