Family portrait: Margot at the Wedding (2007, released 2008), Director Noah Baumbach

Noah Baumach’s latest work Margot at the Wedding will inevitably be compared to his great film The Squid and the Whale from 2005. Margot at the Wedding can be seen as the sequel to this precision work, but the new Baumbach flick cannot reach it.

The Squid and the Whale tells the story of a New York couple of intellectuals and dissects the egotism and neuroses of its characters; Margot at the Wedding has a similar take on them.

Margot (Nicole Kidman) is a New Yorker author who visits her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), together with her adolescent son Claude (Zane Pais), at the house where they both grew up. The relationship between the sisters is defective, but both are trying for a new start because of Pauline’s imminent wedding. As you’d expect, it’s not all that easy - especially as Margot turns out to be rather psychologically ill but hides this often successfully with her cool behaviour; Nicole Kidman gives a convincing Margot thanks to her chilly charisma, and Jennifer Jason Leigh as the hippie-esque, fragile Pauline is fantastic.

Margot’s deep-rooted destructiveness comes out more and more clearly in various scenes. For example during a meal she’d remark, apparently indifferently, on how Pauline never looks one in the eye but always fixates a point on ones front. Which upsets her sister who takes revenge by challenging Margot to climb up the tall tree in the garden, well knowing she wouldn’t be able to come down on her own again. To see Nicole Kidman sitting on a tree in vertiginous height is a rather unusual and also quite amusing spectacle.
The tree in the garden of the dead parents’ house most likely symbolises the family the two sisters come out of – their neighbour claims it has rotten roots.

Baumbach’s incomparable strength lies in telling how intellectuals conspire against each other, destroying each other with words because of – well, what? And so between the sisters rivalry lurks underneath the cover of accordance. Meanwhile Margot has the unsuppressable desire to mingle in everyone’s business around her, including the neighbours’, and to mix up their lives. The situation gets worse when she lets through how little she thinks of Pauline’s future husband Malcolm (badly interpreted by Jack Black). It hardly needs to be mentioned that Margot’s own marriage is breaking and she on top has an affair with publisher Dick (Ciaràn Hinds). For Margot’s character it seems almost logical that she can’t let her sister be happy in a relationship.

The plot of the film is not really relevant and acts as a background for a character study of the two sisters, especially of Margot. There is no first-person narrator, but as already the case in The Squid and the Whale the spectator identifies with the son who doesn’t understand his neurotic mother but at the same time admires her disproportionately, while Margot is swinging between extreme possessiveness towards him and complete rejection. The children, as in ist predecessor film, are manipulated and used against other adults by their parents.

What is piquant in the story is that Margot and Pauline fell out over one of Margot’s books for which she used Pauline’s life as ‚material’ - since Baumbach is known to make heavy use of his own - and his family’s - biography for his films. He anticipates criticism by bringing it in himself, which doesn’t stop him from telling real life stories. And their biting realism is exactly what makes his films. With so much authenticity going on it’s no wonder that with Jennifer Jason Leigh he put his own wife in front of the camera.