At this rate, Noah Baumbach’s next film is going to involve people who are all secretly plotting to kill each other in their sleep. The writer-director has gone from the amiable neurosis of Kicking and Screaming to the screwball insecurity of Mr. Jealousy to the extreme dysfunction of The Squid and the Whale to end up at his latest film, Margot at the Wedding, another explication of a dysfunctional family that manages to be even more prickly, uncomfortable and bleak than Squid was.
It’s also darkly funny and often daring in its intensity; Baumbach seems to be getting to a purer form of misanthropic comedy with each film, and here he wrings humor from domestic abuse, rape, sex with minors and parental neglect. Unlike his sometime collaborator Wes Anderson (the two co-wrote Anderson’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou), Baumbach is reducing the extraneous gimmickry as his career goes on, and this film unfolds largely in mundane locations in and around a house in the Hamptons, with handheld camerawork and plenty of claustrophobic close-ups.
The style doesn’t allow for any actorly sloppiness, and Baumbach gets excellent work out of his cast in sometimes unexpected ways. Nicole Kidman plays the title character, a brittle, easily offended Manhattan fiction writer who grudgingly arrives to attend the marriage of her estranged sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to goofy slacker Malcolm (Jack Black). Along for the ride is Margot’s androgynous teen son, Claude (Zane Pais), whom she alternately smothers and chastises, and who is thus, like the kids in The Squid and the Whale, entirely confused about how to approach life and interact with other people.
Also like the Squid kids, Claude is the child of divorce, although he doesn’t know it yet since Margot has neglected to tell him that she’s come to the area as much to hook up with an old flame as to see her sister get married. Kidman, dressed down but looking as regal and unnatural as ever, gives Margot the perfect air of the overly composed upper-class Manhattanite, an impeccable observer who turns others’ foibles into successful fiction but has no tolerance for anyone perceiving flaws in herself. Leigh is the ideal contrast as the more flighty, sloppy Pauline, who at first seems more likeable but ultimately proves to be just as cunningly malicious as her sister.
The pair’s cold war is a masterpiece of passive-aggression that catches their kids (Pauline has a daughter about Claude’s age) in the middle. The specter of an unseen mother and third sister hangs over the proceedings, and references to past family conflicts offer a glimpse into how monumentally these people have been screwing up each other’s lives for years. Even the seemingly appealing peripheral figures, like Malcolm and Claude, soon reveal themselves as just as emotionally screwed up as the two sisters. Black’s comedic persona, so tough to take seriously, allows the nastiness of Malcolm’s insecurity to sneak up on you.
As uncomfortable an experience as the film often is, it’s never less than fascinating, and shows how easily seemingly harmless jabs and white lies can mount up into a lifetime of barely concealed bitterness. There’s a sort of catharsis at the end, but it’s not nearly as pure or as optimistic as the one at the end of The Squid and the Whale, and there’s the inevitable sinking feeling that none of these people has learned anything or matured emotionally in any way. Yet that’s Baumbach’s painful truth, and here he distills it more sharply and devastatingly than he ever has.
Margot at the Wedding
****
Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Black, Zane Pais
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Rated R
Opens Friday