2007 DVD Review: Margot at the Wedding

Noah Baumbach continues his dogged commitment to being the bracing, realist yin to friend and collaborator Wes Anderson's gentle, whimsical yang. Rushmore is a recreation of adolescence from the perspective of adulthood. Moments of pain and growth are ordered and executed with the affection and meticulousness of a Max Fischer production. Nothing stings too bad because Anderson and his audience surrogates are looking backward, and the pain of that time has been softened by time and the knowledge that things turned out alright in the end. Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, on the other hand, is a representation of adolescence in the present tense. All of the powerlessness and confusion and this-problem-is-the-end-of-the-world angst that gets blurred over time is painfully, brutally present. Anderson's carefully staged theatrical shots are replaced by the jogs and pans of a handheld camera. His teenaged protagonists experience desire not in a capital-r Romantic fashion, but with the squirmy, flushed eroticism of burgeoning testosterone levels.

Wes Anderson's next film, The Royal Tenenbaums, deals in a his patented magical, nostalgia-drenched way with the topic of upper class New York family dysfunction. Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding responds with a similar tale, but laces every frame with barbed wire.

When Margot (Nicole Kidman) and her son Claude vist her estranged siste Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to attend her wedding to moustachioed slacker Malcolm (Jack Black), a lifetime of resentment, hurt, and mistrust bubble to the surface. Actually, bubble is the wrong word: more like come to a rolling boil. What's remarkable about the film is just how fraught practically every line of dialogue is. Every exchange of wordsreveals facets of the relationship between the characters and unspoken personal history. More painful to watch is the way that language is used as a weapon by all parties, with each interaction a zero-sum battle in which there will always be a winner and a loser. The whole film practically vibrates with versimilitude. It's so real, and the relationships depicted are so poisonous, that the viewer can't help but bring their own memories of familial angst to the proceedings. You're left feeling nauseous, especially since there is so little hope of healing or true reconciliation between these people; their wounds are too deep and picked-over, their character flaws are too intractable. Margot, in particular, is so trapped in a morass of solipism and self-pity that she can't reach out of herself to connect with anyone around her on equal terms. She's sort of a female version of Daniel Plainview: people essentially repulse her, and are only useful to her if she can be certain of her absolute control over them. If her sister, or her husband, or her son attempt to exert any autonomy or to call her out on her terminal narcissism, she wields cutting remarks like Plainview swings a bowling pin.

This film was largely ignored by critics and audiences upon its release last winter, but is not because it isn't great: the level of realism, the vividness of the characters and the richness of the dialogue all place it in the top tier of 2007 releases. I think Margot largely failed to draw raves because it's just too uncomfortable and dark to watch for most people. In some ways, it's darker than Oscar winners and certified downers like No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. Those films revel in philosophical bleakness and unflinching examination of evil, but their period trappings and genre plot mechanisms serve to comfort the viewer. As awful as it is to watch Anton Chigurh press his captured bolt gun to someone's forehead, it's not something that most people can relate to their daily lives. Margot at the Wedding, on the other hand, is a portrait of misanthropy and emotional trauma that feels queasily real to anyone who has ever experienced a disasterous family get together. It cuts too close to the bone.

Score: 9.2