Margot at the Wedding: Noah Baumbauch's Stupid Guys turn into Crazy Girls

I must confess two things before reviewing Margot at the Wedding, which I just saw at Doc. First, the males in my family bear striking resemblances to the males in The Squid and the Whale, so I have an exceedingly intimate relationship with the films of Noah Baumbach (it doesn't help that I watched Kicking and Screaming in my last quarter in college). Secondly, in the movie, Margot's son Claude went to Bronx Science, where I also went for high school. So I have that bias as well.

---

"Ennui" is a word that could describe just about every Noah Baumbach movie. Even Baumbach's funny moments are immediately followed by awkward hesitation. Margot at the Wedding may be his most ennui-based movie yet, where every character hates every other character as much as they try to get along with them. While The Squid and the Whale addressed the problems of childhood family life, and Kicking and Screaming dealt with existential crisis of the recent college graduate, Margot at the Wedding is Baumbach's most adult film yet, where we see things from the perspective of the 30-something literati, and not those who depend on them.

The main problem with Baumbach's movies in the past has been his portrayal of women. Perhaps to apologize for that, Margot at the Wedding's focus lays solely on its female characters, with men serving as mere objects to reflecting on the women and not the other way around. While Jack Black gives a fine performance as Malcom, Margot's sister's fiancee, he's still a caricature of the loser male, who may very well have been someone's roommate in Kicking and Screaming (but was somehow smart enough to get into Stuyvesant). The result is a lot more bitchiness over the general idiocy of the males of Baumbach's past work, and a lot more psychopharmaceuticals as well.

I've never been that big a fan of Nicole Kidman, but Margot is without a doubt my favorite role of hers, alternating between being doped up, paranoid, sincere, hostile, defensive, insecure or some combination of each. Hope Davis is also great as Margot's emotionally unstable younger sister Pauline (it's the hormones). While the kids were the strength of The Squid and the Whale, they're actually kind of hollow here, which I found particularly disappointing. It's as if Baumbach sides with whoever he happens to be focusing on for each movie, and all the other characters fall by the wayside. He gets away with it by writing absurd, painfully funny dialog, but he's going to have to make his secondary characters stand on their own two legs more if he wants to advance as a filmmaker.

That being said, I liked Margot at the Wedding a lot, and think it deserved more praise than it got when it came out last fall. It's not a particularly entertaining movie, in the same way that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was not entertaining.