
Love non only hurts, it rips, shreds, tears and devastates. But family doesn’t always mean love, just the people you’re stuck with from giving birth to death, in a blood relationship that sometimes draws blood.
The film explores the dynamics of two sisters, Margot (Nicole Kidman) and Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) who reunite at the coastal family home after a years-long estrangement, for Pauline’s close at hand wedding to unemployed creative person Malcolm (Jack Black). Both damaged from unnamed childhood trauma (sexual abuse is hinted at, never verified) the pretence of niceness quickly fades into recriminations, resentment, and loaded, cynical exchanges.
With wounds still raw and barely scabbed over, the sisters begin to pick at old sore musca volitans. Dad’s idle, but spoken about in hushed, erosive terms. Mum and some other sister, Becky, are living together in a co-dependent cocoon of blame and denial, allegiance and treason.
Each sister has an androgynous child. Claude (Zane Pais) and Ingrid (Flora Cross) ar silent observers, aware of the drama but knowing nothing else to compare it to, try to live out a comparatively normal beingness despite their neurotic moms.
Margot writes for the New Yorker and is a sensibly well-known fiction author. Pauline is a teacher. Both are bright women stifled by a shared childhood of kinsperson dysfunction. Neither trusts the other with her secrets and all motives are suspect. Delicate conversations abound like minefields.
Pauline dares Margot to climb a tree, unrivaled whose roots are meddlesome with a neighbor’s garden (another tense subplot). Fearlessly climbing up, but afraid of descending, Margot necessarily literal rescuing. Like her harsh, sometimes cruel words, she cannot extricate herself from the situations she creates. A bug invades her ear, a source of continual annoyance, like knowledge she doesn’t want but pursues nonetheless. Margot must accept being cerebration of as a eonian troublemaker, non to be trusted with secrets.
Pauline has absorbed all of the hurt, and is less vitriolic but more wary than Margot. She wants approval for her decisions, merely is sure she won’t get it. Pauline seeks comfort in New Eld remedies and medication, while Margot opts for therapy, enhanced covertly by Pauline’s medication. The two talk about sex, past relationships and growing older and invisible. Pauline shares a secret. She should feature known better.
Malcolm is insecure as well. Not the cerebral or social equal of the 2 women, he worsens the impression he makes by being crude and unfitting in casual conversation. He’s weak and can’t be forgiven for it, non in this family. Of course, Margot disapproves of Malcolm and is not afraid to let Pauline know.
Married Margot has an old suitor in the neighborhood, Dick Koozman (Ciaran Hinds) who features her at a bookstore "Conversation with…" only to humble her with probing questions in front of an audience. Dick has a teenage horndog of a daughter, Maisy, (Halley Feiffer) who immediately sets her sights on Claude in her capacity as sitter for him and Ingrid.
A short visit from husband Jim (John Turturro) shows him to be a straightforward writer wHO does non at all perceive his wife’s complexity or desire to leave him. Their relationship is only hinted at, but seems to be one of uncomfortable intimacy without insight of any kind.
Margot domiciliation through Pauline’s possessions, ignoring boundaries, and pocketing pills. Hurt and love hustle off of her knife effortlessly and her sis and son feel its devastating, confusing effects. Spying on contentious neighbors she witnesses a butchered pig being dolled up. From Margot’s view remote, the sight is about obscene. To the witness, it is a intuitive reminder of exposure and rawness. Hand held tv camera shots give off a rawness of their own.
In one scene the sisters apparently laugh over a semi-joke about Becky’s sexual shout. You don’t know if they are serious about the event, or sardonic about the sister. Dark memories loom everywhere just the narrative stays in the acquaint, evolving and unfolding as events need inevitable turns. There’s a confession, a confrontation, some other betrayal and an uprooting on several levels.
Writer/director Noah Baumbach (The Calamary and the Whale) maneuvers through sensitive and maturation family kinetics with an unsentimental and jack-hammer-like strength. Characters are fully developed and each understands both their assigned family purpose and the part their past has played in shaping them.
Nicole Kidman transcends Margot’s psyche in a superstar performance, pulling off the miracle of making a self-centered, self-conceited curmudgeon more than a little harmonic. Jennifer Jason Leigh (likewise Baumbach’s wife) does not shy away from ugliness, whether it’s looking drab and hopeless, or soiling herself in the woods (yes, that way). These two actresses have nailed the disfunction, bitterness and resentment necessary to portray complex and conflicting emotions without unnecessary hysterics or forced manners.
Jack Black provides a sad type of comic relief. Malcolm does not spend a lot of time cerebration, when that’s all that everyone around him does. Like a court jester, he’s tolerated – barely. Growing a mustache because it’s funny only makes it so when he shaves it off, a small change in the midst of an surround where the players are more than a little set in their ways.
John Turturro’s short scenes reveal Jim to be one of the few characters in operation with unity. It will not be enough for Margot, we suspect.
Zane Pais and Flora Cross remind us that thither is collateral damage in any mob, and that they mightiness very well carry the dysfunctional sword lily into the next generation. Claude loves, fears and hates his mother all at at one time, but never wants to leave her side. Ingrid accepts it all stoically.
Margot at the Wedding is a dark, honest look at family interaction that testament make you thankful not to be in that particular gene pool.