Margot (Nicole Kidman) is going to attend her sister Pauline’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wedding. She’s brought her son Claude (Zane Pais) along with her, the two of them supposed to be meeting her sibling’s fiancé Malcolm (Jack Black) at the ferry terminal so he can drive them to their family’s ancestral home. 

Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh in Paramount Vantage's Margot at the Wedding

To Margot, the out of work Malcolm is less than impressive. But Pauline is pregnant. More, she says she loves the guy, and while that doesn’t make a remote bit of sense to her who is she to tell her sister she’s wrong. Not that she won’t drop plenty of hints, the woman doing her best to point out each and every one of what she perceives to be the man’s multiple flaws. But, then, considering how deep this family’s multiple neuroses run this is one case where the pot might just be calling the kettle black.

Welcome to Margot at the Wedding, writer and director Noah Baumbach’s latest foray into the minds of the nihilistically self-possessed and emotionally fragile. With each successive film starting with Kicking and Screaming all the way through the excellent The Squid and the Whale and now culminating with this, the filmmaker’s point of view has gotten bleaker, strident and altogether much more difficult to endure. But he also showcases a singularity of vision that is both laudable and mesmerizing, and even as his characters turn your stomach to knots taking your eyes off of them is pretty much impossible.

Not that Baumbach doesn’t go all out trying to make you do just that. Margot, Pauline and the rest of the people running around in this are so pitiably self-destructive it’s like watching a gigantic two hour emotional train wreck. These people poke and prod and pinch and fidget and fight and flutter around one another like fruit flies fighting over a rotting banana peel, and the more time I spent with them the happier I was my immediate family wasn’t a darn thing like them.

And yet, there is a potent honesty to all of this familial pabulum that’s deeply effective. As much as I wanted to distance myself from Margot’s personal communicative deficiencies the more I could horrifically find facets of them drifting within her. We all sometimes say things we shouldn’t, and in the Mean Girls vernacular unintended “word vomit” is far more a part of everyday life (especially between family members) than we would like to believe.

But Baumbach takes that human trait and pushes it to the extreme. The things these broken individuals discuss are brutal and cutting, all of them slicing into one another with a disassociated deadpan relish that’s highly uncomforting. More, there are times I felt like the director was treating his characters with callous disdain, one person crapping in their own pants in the middle of the wood for no other apparent reason then as an additional cause to make hostile fun of them.

Still, I can’t get this film out of my head. From Kidman’s icy brilliance towards refusing to step away from each and every one of Margot’s destructive flaws, to Jason Leigh’s magnificently complicated turmoil trying to comprehend why it is she continues to love and confide in a sister who refuses to love herself let alone those around here, the cast is universally extraordinary. More, the film ends on a brilliant coda of indecisive decisiveness (an oxymoron, I know) that left me feeling bruised, battered and exhilarated all at the very same time. 

Needless to say, all of this makes Margot at the Wedding a thing which will not appeal to every cinematic pallet. But it is a singularly unique experience filled with startling moments impossible to forget, and while I felt the need to take a shower to get rid of the grit and grime afterwards I just as clearly couldn’t wait to experience some of it again. A confusing statement, true, but that’s just the way it is, and if my family is anything like yours a little confusion now and then is pretty much unavoidable.

Film Rating: êê1/2  (out of 4) 

Additional Links:

-  Margot at the Wedding Theatrical Trailer