I very much loved writer/director Noah Baumbach’s pre­vi­ous film The Squid and The Whale, blessed with an excel­lent script and superb per­for­mances all around (espe­cially by the under­rated Jeff Daniels — heart­break­ing in Pleas­antville and human­iz­ing no less an icon than George Wash­ing­ton in The Cross­ing).

Mar­got at the Wed­ding fea­tures another dys­func­tional fam­ily, but so spec­tac­u­larly so that the char­ac­ters didn’t seem rec­og­niz­ably human to me. I don’t think the prob­lem is as sim­ple as merely iden­ti­fy­ing with the par­tic­u­lars of their lives (abu­sive father, celebrity lifestyle, etc.), for I also had lit­tle in com­mon with the fam­ily in The Squid and The Whale.

It’s like DePalma’s Sis­ters meets Allen’s Interiors

Mar­got (Nicole Kid­man) brings her son to her fam­ily home for her sister’s Pauline (Jen­nifer Jason Leigh) wed­ding to layabout Mal­colm (Jack Black). Pauline is the sole fam­ily mem­ber inse­cure Mar­got can phys­i­cally face, which she can only man­age through pas­sive aggres­sive games assert­ing her supe­ri­or­ity. We barely glimpse a third sis­ter and their mother, from whom Mar­got lit­er­ally flees. They feud with the strangely sav­age neigh­bors, pro­vid­ing yet another set of char­ac­ters for Mar­got to look down upon.

Unlikely Jack Black Roman­tic Pair­ing (no. 845 in a series)

Margot’s (Nicole Kid­man) favorite pas­time is arm­chair psy­cho­analy­sis cou­pled with a kind of inverse hypochon­dria. Obsessed with detect­ing symp­toms of men­tal ill­ness in every­one around her (the irony being that she’s often cor­rect), she fails to diag­nose her­self. She’s a fic­tion writer whose work bears more than a pass­ing resem­blance to her family’s his­tory. Margot’s fail­ure of the imag­i­na­tion amounts to a kind of theft, and is a cen­tral theme of the movie. “How much of your work is auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal?” is no doubt a cut­ting ques­tion nearly every writer (includ­ing Noah Baum­bach) hears at least once a day. Margot’s lover Dick (Cia­rán Hinds) even uses it as a weapon to pub­licly attack her. It is cruel, but in her case, accurate.

Offi­cial movie site: www.margotatthewedding.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to me.

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