Margot At The Wedding

Noah Baumbach is truly becoming an auteur in his own right. His films are instantly identifiable: little to no non-diagetic music, subjects are middle class artists or children of middle class artists, themes of dysfunctional family dynamics and awkward sexual discoveries, hand-held cameras, etc. Like Andrew Bujalski, he's a rare new breed of auteur who favors character study over plot and breaks down cinematic conventions in an effort to put us directly into the dynamics between his characters.
His most recent offering again deals with the raw pain and awkward humor that comes with living in a family of selfishness and eccentricity. Margot is a renowned poet who takes her pre-pubescent son, Claude, to the wedding of her estranged sister, Pauline. Baumbach writes her childishly selfish and manipulative dialouge as if he endured such similar parenting. Very much like the relationship between Walt and Frank in 'The Squid and the Whale', the film finds Claude at a crucial moment in his relationship with his mother: he adores her, but is becoming mature enough to see how she poisons him with put-downs-all the while showering him with affection. Fortunately for us, no one else is spared Margot's abuse. After receiving a gift in the form of slippers from her estranged husband, all she can tell him later is that she already has a pair and that they make her feel like he doesn't know her anymore. Later, while riding in a car with a woman hysterical over her wounded dog, Margot cannot help herself from saying how annoyed she is. Pauline and her unemployed fiance, Malcolm, immediately become Margot's target. The visit becomes an exercise in endurance as Margot endlessly tells Pauline how unworthy he is of her. And, in an act of kinship after years of estrangement, Pauline confides in Margot her pregnancy which she has kept from everyone else. It's not long before Margot spreads the news like a dirty little secret.
So much of the film rests on the effortlessly natural chemistry between Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh. They bicker, giggle, and whisper so well that it seems as if they've been acting together for years. After spending so many years in a considerable career decline, it seems as if the only reason Leigh got the role of Pauline was because her husband wrote and directed the film. Whatever the case, its a great to see her again. Not enough can be said of Nicole Kidman. As Margot, she transverses masterfully from ice cold cruelty and casual manipulation to childlike crying fits and "I didn't do anything wrong" shock. If only she didn't let her Australian accent slip so many times, this would have been a perfect performance.
Noah Baumbach is something of a contradiction. He seems so destined to remove the viewer from any sense of movie watching that he deletes cinematic elements that are so basic to common filmmaking. For all his good intentions though, this just leaves the viewer feeling more left out. He heavily cuts his scenes so that no shot lasts longer than a few seconds. The intention is to leave the viewer feeling uncomfortable and out of breath. We do, but over-cutting just leads to an overall feeling of interruption. Baumbach also transitions from scene to scene with a kind of improvisational style all his own. Establishing shots are rare, so we're always suddenly thrust into the middle of the next scene. This surely succeeds on a humor level (see the tree climbing scene), but often there's no way for us to reconcile the action we were just in the middle of - especially if the scene peaks at the end. Well, he may be a contradiction, but at least there's a popular American filmmaker out there taking considerable chances.