Noah Baumbach (2007)

Margot (Nicole Kidman), a writer who lives in Manhattan, comes outstate with her son Claude (Zane Pais) for the wedding of her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), although the two sisters haven’t been on speaking terms for some time.  Pauline, who’s pregnant, and her groom-to-be Malcolm (Jack Black) live with Ingrid (Flora Cross), Pauline’s daughter from a previous relationship, in the family home left to Pauline by her mother (although we gather the mother’s still alive).  In the large grounds of the house, there’s an enormous tree, which Pauline’s hostile neighbours want to see removed.   The tree – sentimentally precious to Pauline and Margot (‘part of our childhood’) but soon identifiable as a whopping symbol of the deep-rooted antagonisms in their unhappy family – ends up horizontal, flattening the wedding marquee.  It doesn’t really matter because by that stage the wedding is off anyway.

I’m glad I saw Greenberg (2010) before this film; if I’d seen Margot at the Wedding at the time of its release I doubt I’d have returned for more from Noah Baumbach.  I went back to the note on Greenberg to remind myself why I liked it and how it compares with Margot.  Both have selfish, hurtful protagonists with warped competitive instincts (although Margot, unlike Roger Greenberg, is professionally successful); the human beings closest to them get hurt the most.  Like most of the Baumbach oeuvre, both films feature dogs in peril.  It’s easy to accept they’re the work of the same director yet Greenberg is entertaining and incisive, Margot hateful and amorphous.  How did that happen?  The casting of the protagonist is one reason but not the whole story.  In Greenberg, Ben Stiller’s lightweight persona is used to great effect.  We’re surprised to see him playing a depressive; at the same time he exploits our idea of him as a shallow underdog both to express the character‘s superficiality and make us root for Roger Greenberg.  As the viciously neurotic Margot, Nicole Kidman is in one sense very well cast.  Her competitiveness as a performer is fused here with the woman she’s playing:  because Margot wants to win every interaction she has – with Claude, with Pauline, with Malcolm – it’s less obvious that Kidman is trying to get the better of the other actors.  It’s hard to fault what she does, except that she’s charmless – and Baumbach would hardly see that as a fault.

Margot at the Wedding is described on Wikipedia as a ‘tragicomedy’.  Another contemporary film about a dysfunctional family and with a matrimonial setting, Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married (2008), genuinely merits that description but Margot is hardly a comedy at all.  It’s glumly misanthropic and Baumbach’s snippy dialogue is used mostly to intensify the gloom.  The opening sparring between Margot and Pauline, where determined affability and inevitable friction are finely, tensely balanced, draws you in.  And there’s the odd detail that seems comically promising – like Margot on the lookout for signs of autism the way different kinds of phobe used to spot Jews or gays on television.  In a good Woody Allen film, this kind of neurosis would be worked into the comic texture in a way that made it funny.  Here, it’s soon merely unpleasant.  (There’s another resonance with Allen when Pauline rails against Margot using their family as material for her writing:  it reminds you how acutely and enjoyably the same idea is handled in Hannah and Her Sisters.)

Baumbach clearly isn’t interested in lightening the material by comic invention; what makes Margot such a lowering experience is that his screenplay doesn’t give the actors any real opportunity to penetrate their characters either.  Unlike in Greenberg, he fails either to sympathise with or to dramatise the central character’s corrosive egotism.  He does no more than assert, relentlessly, that people can be shitty and human relationships irreparable.  And much of the film, shot by Harris Savides, is so dark-toned that it’s sometimes hard to see what’s going on even physically.  This lack of lighting may be realistic but it gets to seem like an expression not only of Baumbach’s pessimism but of his inability to speak his mind through the characters and the story.  The film is both miasmic and impacted.

The only thing that Baumbach really gets across is that venomous parents can poison their children.  (The Squid and the Whale (2005) did the same, although with more sophistication.)  Margot’s early teenage son Claude is hapless chiefly because he adores his mother, who appears to be turning him into an androgynous blob.  Zane Pais is somewhat affecting as Claude – but in an uncomfortable way because it’s Pais’s own physical qualities which Baumbach uses to express Claude’s plight.   It seems that whenever someone threatens to be likeable, Baumbach resorts to making them contemptible through their ridiculous appearance.  Jack Black does creditably as Pauline’s fiancé Malcolm (like Roger Greenberg, a man bitterly resenting his failure to make it in the world of rock music) but when Margot tells her sister that Malcolm’s wrong for her you tend to agree – not least because he looks so garishly silly.  Malcolm confesses to Pauline that he’s had it off with Maisy (Halley Feiffer), the daughter of their malignant neighbour Dick Koosman (Ciaran Hinds), who’s also a professional associate of Margot (and the main reason she bothered to come for the wedding at all).  Baumbach finds it necessary to have Malcolm break down abjectly – into blubbering blubber, unworthy of sympathy largely because the sight of him is alienating.   The director seems anxious to thwart his characters even in their bid to win the nastiness stakes.   Dick Koosman delivers such an expert low blow when he interviews Margot in front of an audience – he asks if the paedophile father she’s presented in one of her stories is, rather than a portrait of her own father, a self-portrait – that she’s reduced to stumbling, helpless tears.

Canine trauma is coming to seem a litmus test in Baumbach pictures.  In Greenberg, Roger tends his brother’s ailing Alsatian and the dog recovers:  it’s Roger’s most successful relationship.   In Margot, as the tensions between the people get worse, the family mongrel Wizard disappears.  When things have got even worse, Margot, who’s met up briefly with her ex-husband (John Turturro), has a roadside encounter with the distraught owner of a different dog that’s been hit by a car and is gravely injured.   Wizard eventually comes home, unharmed though looking the worse for wear, just as the tree is about to topple.   That’s the last we see of the dog.  I wasn’t sure if he ended up in the same position as the marquee although Sally thought I was being unduly pessimistic.

4 February 2011