The TGIF Movie Review: Margot at the Wedding
February 29th, 2008 by Matt
(Editor’s note: Sorry about the delay. I’ll blame it on the snow. Yeah, that’s it: it was the snow’s fault!)
Margot at the Wedding is a film written and directed by, go figure, writer/director Noah Baumbach, and this is his follow-up after his Oscar-nominated flick The Squid and the Whale. Like the aforementioned flick “about” a cephalopod and a cetacean, this movie centers around families gone just a wee-bit haywire, marriages on the rocks, affairs, kids caught in the middle, and the forces driving people together and apart.
The film stars Nicole Kidman (equal parts biting, subtle, and heart-breaking) as Margot Zeller, a fiction writer, who takes her son in tow by train, boat, and car to her sister’s pad (Pauline, played by the beguiling Jennifer Jason Leigh) for a weekend. Pauline is set to marry Malcolm (Jack Black), an unemployed artist/writer/rocker, and the Zeller clan is getting together for the first time in a long time for the event. Secrets get shared and hidden, Black pulls off some laugh-out-loud hilarity in the midst of a relatively serious flick, and the tenderness that can be shared between those who love one another gets shot all to hell.
While I didn’t go all “Rah! Rah!” for The Squid and the Whale, I dug this flick because there’s hope hidden beneath the surface callousness of the players. Baumbach creates more believable characters by way of a looser script, which allows the actors to move organically through scenes. In much of his previous work (particularly the Wes Anderson directed flick, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou), the characters are so affected you feel like you’ve been left out of a story told by old Ivy-League roommates. Here, though, I buy the conflicts, I buy the back-stories, I buy the surprises, I buy the love that nearly gets expressed. (And maybe that’s the up-shot of the flick: love, at best and at worst, can only be nearly expressed).
But you don’t need to buy it. Just rent this sucker.
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