MARGOT AT THE WEDDING
Directed by Noah Baumbach. Starring Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Black. Now playing.
3 1/2 Stars

Last week I had to go to the hospital to have a cyst removed from my chin. The procedure began with the doctor producing a needle that appeared to be the length of his forearm and injecting me about half a dozen times. Once I was sufficiently numb, he laid me down on a table, painted my chin with mercurochrome, draped a sheet over my eyes (presumably so that I wouldn’t get freaked out by the sight of the increasingly bloody scalpel in his hand), sliced my chin open and began painstakingly extracting all the goop that was causing my chin to bulge out like the son’s on American Dad. Apparently a lot of the tissue was attached to the bone, which meant that for about 15 minutes, the only sound I hard was his knife scratching against my chin—it was the sound of someone slowly removing ice from a windshield, or scraping two or three coats of paint from an antique chair.
I mention all this because just last night I went to see Margot at the Wedding, and I think that, given the choice between undergoing that procedure again and spending a weekend cooped up in a house with these characters, I think I’d let Dr. Mehling have another go at my chin.
However, in the hands of writer/director Noah Baumbach, sitting at a safe remove from the action in the movie theatre and watching these miserable people making each other even more miserable is a surprisingly enjoyable experience. That’s assuming, of course, that you have a taste for the new breed of comedy where, instead of snappy one-liners, you get excruciatingly protracted scenes of social awkwardness. Margot at the Wedding makes Baumbach’s previous film, the painfully autobiographical divorce dramedy The Squid and the Whale, seem like a Neil Simon play by comparison. The things these people say to each other would make Todd Solondz flinch.
Nicole Kidman plays Margot, a successful literary author with a bad habit of taking family secrets and using them as fodder for her fiction. She’s arrived at her family’s New England summer home to attend the marriage of her estranged sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Malcolm (Jack Black), an unemployed musician who’s trying to pass off writing letters to the local alt-weekly as one of his “jobs.” “I can’t say I hold out a lot of hope for the whole thing,” Margot tells her son Claude (Zane Pais) during the trip down, and when he asks why they’re going, she replies, “We’re supporting her!”
With support like Margot’s, who needs enemies? Faultlines were already developing in Pauline and Malcolm’s relationship before she even got there, but Margot’s quietly disapproving presence, her habit of poking at old wounds and asking inappropriate questions, has a way of turning them into gaping fissures. Baumbach’s decision to cast Kidman as this horrible woman is a masterstroke—there’s always been something icy and ruthless behind Kidman’s eyes, and she smartly plays Margot as if she truly believes she’s the victim. (“Stop picking on me!” is one of her favourite exclamations.)
Baumbach devotes perhaps a little too much screentime to the predictable unraveling of Pauline and Malcolm’s relationship (although Black’s blubbering phone call to Pauline begging her to take him back is one of the film’s comic highlights) and not enough to the more interesting, weirdly Oedipal relationship between Margot and Claude. You can see why he’s so enthralled with Margot—when you’re a kid, it’s a thrill to hear an adult talking candidly about other adults’ flaws—but you can also see what a smothered, psychological mess she’s turning him into.
The Squid and the Whale ends with its teenaged hero breaking away from the toxic embrace of his literary father and running through Central Park. Margot at the Wedding reverses that ending: just when it looks like Claude is about to escape Margot’s clutches, if only temporarily, she races furiously after him, as if to signal to him he’ll never, ever get away. Poor kid.