Margot at the Wedding

Reviews

Think your family's mad as a March hare? They ain't got nothing on these guys, promises a reasonably impressed Noel McAdam

Friday, March 28, 2008

Actors, eh? You can't live with them, you can't make movies without 'em. The story goes that Kidman, Black and Jason Leigh actually moved in together for this project to perfect their roles as a dysfunctional family.

To paraphrase Laurence Olivier's wonderful remark to Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man, had they never heard of acting? Nonetheless, it worked. No hissy fits, no heading off to hide in the star caravan, and a noteworthy film.

Kidman is at her ice maiden best as Margot, the author who makes fiction out of her family's realities, yet is unable to face up to her own.

Black is, uncharacteristically, playing against type as Malcolm, a former musician now trying out abstract art, and not entirely opposed to crashing convention, which is where his wedding to Pauline (the always excellent Jason Leigh) runs into difficulties.

"I haven't had that thing yet," says Malcolm, "where you realize that you're not the most important person in the world."

Margot, not without her own marital difficulties, arrives with her awkward son Claude (Zane Pais) for the wedding of her sister Pauline and finds she immediately disapproves of her choice of partner.

This is a group of people replete with tensions, secrets and unresolved pasts. Watching is equal parts entertaining and excruciating.

Fully cogniscent of its own quirky sensibilities, the script is full of whimsy masquerading as wisdom, but always at least engaging and interesting.

"I was dating that guy Horace back then," Pauline reminds Margot. " Do you remember him?"

"Was that the guy who liked to rough you up?" Margot replies. " No, that was our dad," says Pauline.

And yet this follow-up to the excellently observed The Squid and the Whale from writer director Noah Baumbach (who just happens to be the real life hubby of Jason Leigh) often fails to negotiate that thin line between humour and pain.

Both films are about creative people caught in traps they have made for themselves, but the semi-autobiographical Squid and the Whale — where the focus was fairly off-the-wall children coping with the divorce of their parents — could make you laugh and wince at the same time.

It was also set in a somewhat idealised past; here we have contemporary people and (as in some of Woody Allen's non-comic work such as Interiors or Another Woman) you can't help feeling they are creating problems just because they have little else to fill out their little lives.

Pauline tells Malcolm: "You're competitive with everyone. It doesn't even matter if they do the same thing as you. He's competitive with Bono."

"It's true," says Malcolm. "I don't subscribe to the credo that there's enough room for everyone to be successful. I think there are only a few spots available, and people like Dick Koosman and Bono are taking them up."

At times you feel like a fly on the wall, almost intrusive, but at other times you ask yourself how much you care about these folk. There is one particularly agonizing scene, where Margot's former lover — the latest in a series of excellent cameos by our own Hindsy, currently on a 'real roles' roll — interviews her before an audience in the library.

To say more would spoil some cruel enjoyment.

And for all their intelligence and imagination, these people can still pull off politically incorrect.

"I think, historically," says Malcolm, who always has something to say, "women have been held back in so many ways that when they get power like they do behind the wheel, they can't help but abuse it."

Further fragmentation ensues as the week regresses, until Malcolm commits one particularly foul indiscretion which has him in tears and despair, and Margot and Pauline in flight.

But talking — good, honest, direct, plain talking — can resolve anything.

Can't it?