Margot at the Wedding
Coming off the painfully funny and unflinchingly incisive family divorce and dissection of The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding feels like it must also be stealing a hefty sum of pages from writer-director Noah Baumbach's own life, so unbearably realized are all of its characters and their interactions. Critics have lambasted this film for being a character-based drama without a single likable character; this is a definite case of misjudgment, as all these characters strike me as being a bit like William H. Macy's character from Magnolia, all still in search of a healthy and mature way to express the love that's causing them to behave in destructive patterns, unwittingly ruining their own loves and soiling their best intentions because they can't escape perspectives that are self-oriented. Of course, Nicole Kidman's character study is the centerpiece here, and if Daniel Day-Lewis was this year's embodiment of Ahabism, Kidman's work is more everyday if no less insidious, intense, and saddening. In the end the film is far more kind to her, though, implying that despite all her actions their is something redemptive in the movement of her heart, it's just a movement constantly distorted by her hubris.
The story drifts a bit between its events and would have benefited from the more pronounced building of tensions that Baumbach used to push The Squid and the Whale forward; also, the humor is still funny but less convincing than The Squid and the Whale's utterly natural incorporation of levity through the clash of character foibles. Watching Jack Black run for half a minute in fear of an incensed father made me chuckle, but it seems more of an insert than a result. If there's an improvement, it consists in Baumbach taking more cues from the early work of Eric Rohmer, crafting a talky film that doesn't really feel talky because the talk is not plot, it's character splayed out through the rhythms of conversation -- these long passages punctuated with almost-silent visual moments (Margot in the tree, the pool, the pig slaughtering, Margot running after the bus) that are thus imbued with force like that of a punch to the gut. Harris Savides made digital look like film earlier this year with Zodiac; here he channels the spirit of DP Nestor Almendros into a decidedly modern, loose approach that's the perfect fit for Baumbach's elaboration of connected short stories into one feature length. Not quite a great film perhaps, but like The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, it's at least a fine collection of great scenes that give some context to each other.
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