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Noah Baumbach, Margot at the Wedding

by Kathryn Durfee
12/20/2007

My great grandmother used to shake her fists and exclaim, "Everyone goes to the well!" We would smile and nod, confused. We later learned that this is the first part of an old Italian saying. In a nutshell, everyone in the village dumps their problems into a well in a "grass is greener" sort of deal. No matter how bad they think their problems are, people will always choose to take back their own rather than shoulder the burdens of others. This is how I felt while watching Noah Baumbach's latest film, Margot at the Wedding.

The film opens with Margot (Nicole Kidman) and her son Claude (Zane Pais) on the way to visit Margot's coastal childhood home to attend the wedding of her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to the not-so-impressive Malcolm (Jack Black). Pauline has a daughter, Ingrid, from a previous marriage she claims was torn apart by one of Margot's too-close-to-true stories and is pregnant with Malcolm's child, a fact she wants to keep secret.

Margot and Pauline have had a rocky past, but Margot claims to be "over it." This may be partly true, but Margot is also using the trip as an excuse to get away from her husband and meet up with her former lover. What follows is a very awkward, sometimes ruthless, but consistently honest look at a family of insecure individuals searching for a sense of comfort they clearly will never have. In addition to the issues they have with one another, Pauline and Malcolm are in a feud with their neighbors, the Voglers, a creepy clan that seems to have lost their way back to the film Deliverance.

The resulting film is, similar to Baumbach's last personal project The Squid and the Whale, painful to watch. Throughout the 92-minute runtime, I found myself oscillating between a feeling of guilt and fear that I have inadvertently treated anyone in my family in the manner these two women do and an uncontrollable desire to wring the necks of everyone on screen.

Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh deliver their lines like robots; declarations of love and joy are followed by statements of disdain and disappointment with very little change in tone, catching the audience off guard. They appear to take pleasure in causing each other pain and embarrassment. For these two women, everything is an exhausting and frustrating competition: Pauline is a better swimmer but Margot can climb trees. Everything is an opportunity to outdo each other, as if they are competing for attention and love from someone that doesn't exist. The girls make it clear that Daddy wasn't the best (their excuse for fucking their way through their 20s), which is probably why Margot can't cope with her nice and patient husband Jim, and Pauline has learned how to love through books and seminars.

Both sisters are childlike, whiny, and immature. Essentially, they can dish it out but they can't take it. The one thing Margot is right about is the Malcolm's lack of worth. She compares him to the guys they would have rejected when they were 16. The harsh reality is, the sisters realize, they're no longer 16 and there are no longer that many guys to reject. Black, usually seen in low-mimetic comedies, here portrays a slovenly, jobless musician/painter who is just as confused and in need of a hug as the rest of the bunch. Aside from a few funny lines, he is a pathetic character with a large gut and a mustache that's "meant to be funny." Unfortunately, it's not. It's awkward just like the rest of the film.

Which brings us to the Voglers, a strange addition to the film. I was expecting some climactic encounter between the feuding neighbors, maybe something that reunited this incredibly dysfunctional family, but it never came. They are just creepy and weird, and provide another outlet for Margot's anger. They might also be present to serve as another mirror for Margot's hypocritical tendencies. She hates them but is strangely drawn to them, spying on them through the fence and peering through their windows.

Margot, I assume, is a foil for Baumbach. She is accused by Pauline of stealing tidbits of family history for her stories, just as I imagine Baumbach has been. I could be wrong; this may not be Baumbach's family. However, the familiarity with both this family and that of The Squid and the Whale suggests he's encountered these people somewhere. His characters are cold, mean, self-absorbed, and starving for attention. The only characters for whom I felt any sort of pity were the children; with mothers that refused to grow up and get over themselves, there is little hope for the children to make it through unscathed.

I can honestly say that if I encountered Margot and Pauline dumping their daddy issues and self-obsessed behavior into the village well, I would turn tail and run.

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