Twisted sister

Nicole Kidman stars as Margot in the Noah Baumbach film Margot at the Wedding. (Ken Regan/Paramount Vantage)

It’s strange to be on the other side of the critical divide, waving uncertainly at the crowd of consensus across the way. When I saw Margot at the Wedding during the Toronto Film Festival, I laughed so hard it hurt, and winced as much, and adored the discomfort. The film left me ill at ease, but dizzyingly entertained. Yet in the theatre, there was mostly silence, and it soured by the end into something that felt like anger.

Now, as early reviews for Margot roll in, my litmus-test impression proves right: many critics loathe this film. The New York Post dug deep for the old “I’ve had root canals that were more enjoyable” analogy. The general dismissal (with a few exceptions) of Noah Baumbach’s arch, pointed followup to The Squid and the Whale seems to boil down to: I hate these people. Why would I want to hang out with them?

Let me suggest that there are many unlikable figures who are worthy of examination. Start, perhaps, with the star of Paradise Lost. Now skip ahead several centuries to Margot (Nicole Kidman), sister of Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Pauline is about to get married in a dusty family house overlooking a stormy sea somewhere near New York. Margot, an author of some esteem, is angular and venomous, a postmodern mess of bad interpretations and seething subtext. “I’m here to support Pauline,” Margot explains to her son, Claude (Zane Pais), an androgynous adolescent with a sweet, bruised disposition.

“I thought you weren’t speaking to her,” he says.

“She wasn’t speaking to me,” says Margot. “But I’m over it.”

If there’s one certainty about this wedding weekend, it’s that no one is over anything. A story Margot wrote about her sister that appeared in The New Yorker helped expedite the end of Pauline’s first marriage, and this, presumably, is only one of many Margot transgressions that lie between the pair. As Pauline mentions with a laugh, young Margot sprinkled baby Pauline with paprika and put her in the oven. Leigh, who is married to Baumbach, has just the right off-kilter, unforced charm to make Pauline’s stick-it-outitide fathomable.

Pauline is a softer specimen than her sister, armouring herself with self-help seminars and healing crystals. She’s about to marry Malcolm (Jack Black, even more like a meat loaf than usual), an unemployed semi-musician who once played with Ric Ocasek (post-Cars) and now spends a lot of time writing letters to magazines and newspapers. When Malcolm arrives to pick up Margot and Claude at the ferry dock, he’s sporting a sad little moustache that’s “meant to be funny,” he announces. In response to this needy joke, Margot delivers a lacerating half-smile that castrates him on the spot.

Jennifer Jason Leigh, left, portrays Pauline and Jack Black is her fiancé, Malcolm, in Margot at the Wedding. (Ken Regan/Paramount Vantage)

Margot has come less to play bridesmaid — it’s hard to imagine an event where Margot is not the centre — than to explore the possibility of leaving her husband, Jim (a warm, solid John Turturro). She’s being pursued by Dick (Ciaran Hinds), a righteous, best-selling author who has a house nearby and makes mocking inquiries about Jim’s “experimental fiction.”

A remote island may not be the healthiest getaway for a bunch of neurotic, self-fascinated intellectuals; some might think that a large open field, perhaps populated only by a sniper in a tree, would be better. But Baumbach’s locale is a nod to his cinematic heroes. He lays his French new wave jump cuts over Bergman-Allen angst, and gives sharper edges to Eric Rohmer’s quotidian conversations. Those guys all knew that an island makes a great place for cerebral castaways: isolation from the real world only fortifies lack of perspective, and there’s plenty of downtime in which to catalogue every historical hurt. Margot has the ability — though we never quite know just how talented she is — to funnel all this familial heartache into literature.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach likes to probe the grotesque things people do in the name of art. His film debut at age 26, the 1995 film Kicking and Screaming, centred around a pair of recent college grads and wannabe writers who would whip out their notebooks and fight over who got to “use” whatever experience or witticism had just occurred.

In Margot, Baumbach pushes the link between parenting and making art, both acts of creation that easily turn parasitic in the wrong hands. Baumbach himself has a little Margot in him; he’s admitted that he drew on his own childhood to depict so beautifully the careless cruelties of the divorcing Brooklyn intellectuals in The Squid and the Whale. (Baumbach’s father is a novelist, and his mother a former Village Voice film critic.) One senses that in this film, Claude is Baumbach’s stand-in, the recipient of those small, unshakeable childhood humiliations that are the director’s signature. Just one example: Claude stares at his babysitter’s breasts and then endures her telling him that he should use deodorant.

Malcolm talks with his future sister-in-law, Margot. (Ken Regan/Paramount Vantage)

This little white corner of world may be too rarefied for some, but the voices Baumbach creates ring with authenticity; he knows how these people talk, even if he doesn’t — and we don’t — like what they say. And their way of speaking is desperately self-conscious, each reference — Barnard; Stuyvesant High; knowing Alice Munro; writing a screenplay — dangling like a charm on a bracelet worn only by a certain group of upper-class talkers, not walkers.

But Baumbach, I would argue, also has a wide view of how badly people behave in the privacy of all families, because family is a safe — and, of course, dangerous — place. Margot, sitting on the front steps with her son, examines his face. “Everybody thinks you’re so funny and charming,” she says, and then turns: “You used to be rounder, more graceful. You’re stiff now; so blasé.”

She over shares; she treats her son more like a lover than a child; she confides in him while stoned, and then mocks him when he needs her. She is monstrous and fascinating, always diagnosing others — she thinks everyone is autistic — but incapable of self-diagnosis, unless it flatters her. Kidman controls the part beautifully, using her icy looks to great effect. She plays Margot’s narcissism as another WASP-y privilege, much like her linen pants and her immaculate makeup. Her damage is her entitlement, and her entitlement is her damage.

Margot and Pauline have just left their 30s, and this is one of the first films I’ve seen about the aging of late Generation Xers, or the grungy, nameless generation that came right after. (Full disclosure: these are my people, in age only, and perhaps that’s part of why I responded strongly to the film.) The sisters flip through their obsolete vinyl and Pauline reminisces that Margot used to mail her albums from the big city: X, the Pixies, R.E.M. The characters seem stunned by adulthood, talking wistfully about the number of guys they slept with in their 20s (“Want me to count?” “No, Margot. I don’t.”), and the pop culture that’s faded out of their lives. “I don’t really listen to music anymore,” says Margot, clinking the ice in her ever-present white wine, and you get a glimpse of the enormous lack of pleasure in her life, of a circling loss. In these moments, I found her immensely sympathetic, and sad.

Perhaps some critics are recoiling from Margot because films about abuse aren’t allowed to be subtle; we need the black eyes and the courtroom confrontations to feel moved by the tortures that parents inflict on their kids. But listen closely to the rat-a-tat dialogue, and the way the sisters breeze past mentions of their father as a major creep, if not an out-and-out abuser. Baumbach understands that people learn to live with their hurt, but not always in a state of grace.

Next door to the house is a family of back-to-the-landers (and the land is from Deliverance) who are feuding with Pauline over a dead tree they want her to cut down. Margot spies on them as they cook a slaughtered pig and stroll naked in their house; they’re as scary and hideous to her as she is to us. But later, Claude, in a perpetual state of yearning, watches that other mother on a ferry, lovingly stroking the hair of her thuggish son.

There are many ways to be a family, and sometimes the public face has little to do with the depths of a family’s private sadness, or private love. Baumbach’s artistic campaign in his last two films has been to make films not just about bad parenting, but about indulgence, about privilege and about love, in even its ugliest forms. And he makes this investigation hilarious. Who wouldn’t want to hang out with that?

Margot at the Wedding opens Nov. 23 in Toronto, Dec. 7 in Montreal and Vancouver and Dec. 14 in other major cities.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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