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Margot At The Wedding - Preview

Margot At The Wedding

Preview by Jack Foley

NOAH Baumbach has become one of Hollywood’s richest talents since his last film The Squid & The Whale captured so many people’s attention.

The story of a warring husband and wife (Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney) as seen through the eyes of their children was a heavy awards winner, Oscar nominee and attracted the cream of Hollywood’s richest talent to want to work with him.

His follow-up project, Margot At The Wedding, hit US cinemas in November and attracted a first-rate cast, including Nicole Kidman, Jack Black, John Turturro and Jennifer Jason Leigh.

The topic this time around is sisterhood and the story picks up as Margot (Kidman) and her adolescent son Claude (Zane Pais) travel to Long Island to attend her sister Pauline’s (Leigh) imminent wedding to Malcolm (Black). Even though Margot is a successful writer with a compassionate husband (Turturro), she is repressed, bitter, insecure, and angry and she takes out her frustrations on anyone and everyone around her.

Pauline is initially happy that her sister has decided to come to the wedding, but she quickly realizes that Margot is still her terrible old self and, over the course of a few days, past conflicts erupt and present conflicts explode, threatening not only to put a damper on the wedding, but to ruin it completely.

Of the cast members, Kidman describes the role as a return to the “tone of humour in [early films] like To Die For“, while Black looks to build on the good work he did in last year’s The Holiday as a romantic leading man. He sought out Baumbach after seeing The Squid & The Whale.

According to Leigh, who is playing against type as the happier of the characters, the script captures ‘‘the worst of all your family dynamics’‘ but remains bitingly funny in places. Needless to say, the film is being viewed as another potential awards contender.

However, it drew a mixed response from US critics. Those in favour included The New York Times, which wrote that “when it comes to emotional violence, Margot At The Wedding is hard to beat, while Entertainment Weekly awarded it an A- and declared that Baumbach has become “a specialty master at blurring the line between the dysfunctionally appalling and the articulately entertaining”.

The Hollywood Reporter, meanwhile, concluded that “Noah Baumbach takes on sibling rivalry in this audacious, brilliantly performed dysfunctional tragicomedy”.

But Variety was less impressed, stating that “Margot At The Wedding is a circus of family neuroses and bad behaviour that perhaps a therapist could make sense of better than Noah Baumbach can”. And The New York Post declared: “I’ve had root canals that were more enjoyable than Margot At The Wedding, Noah Baumbach’s hugely pretentious, ugly and annoying follow-up to The Squid & The Whale.”

Rolling Stone, however, wrote that “it’s the people, not the plot, driving this comedy of appalling manners. And Baumbach, with acute intelligence and annihilating wit, writes people with flaws we can (if we’re honest) recognize as our own”.

Margot At The Wedding is due to open in UK cinemas on February 8, 2008.