While we’re encouraging you to not go to films, how about we be positive for once? The New York Times has an excellent feature on the bitingly funny and trenchantly painful new Noah Baumbach film, “Margot At The Wedding” which stars Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Black and is one of our favorite films of the year so far (our review).
It’s about two sisters – one who is a neurotic, mean spirited, and exasperatingly critical and difficult (Kidman in a daring, tour de force performance), and one a free-spirited bohemian (an always-amazing Jason Leigh) who is getting a married to an underachieving schlub (Black). The tightly-wound Kidman, who is a semi-celebrated New York author (totally vampiric, she leeches stories from her sisters dramas to fuel her books) isn’t having it and when her and her 11-year-old son come to visit Pauline (Leigh) for the wedding, she does everything in her narcissistic power to dissuade her sister from going through with the marriage.
It gets really ugly and really funny from there. The Times speaks of it’s “emotional violence” and lord if that’s not dead-on. It’s a film that’s hard to watch at times, but it’s humor and pain dichotomy is amazingly caustic, bittersweet and honest.
We digress, the interview with the players. Everyone always assumes Baumbach’s family films (see “The Squid & The Whale”) are autobiographical and this tends to get on his nerves after a while. Like any good writer, if and when he does mine his personal life for story elements, he utilizes them as a launching pad for his imagination. “If I’m using something that’s familiar or from my life, it’s only to ground me so I can invent off of that.”
But critics still insist. “Someone would ask me if something was true, and I’d say no, and then they’d ask me a follow-up question under the assumption that it was true,” Baumbach told the Times. “I’d get tripped up answering a question about my real father based on something in the movie that wasn’t real.”
There’s actually one scene in ‘Margot’ that the writer/director wrote as a response to this critical presumptuousness.
Margot, a fiction writer in the throes of a personal crisis, is at a bookstore appearance, which goes quickly awry when her interviewer presses her on the connections between her life and her work. He brings up a story of hers that concerns an abusive patriarch. She immediately begins to defend her father. He interrupts: What he meant to ask was whether she had based that monstrous figure on herself.
“I was having fun with what people assume when they think something is autobiographical,” Baumbach said.
Some critics that the characters (especially Kidman’s) are too dislikable and they’re right, she’s one of the most monstrous mothers seen onscreen in recent memory with a vicious tongue, but that’s sort of the whole point of the film.
“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with not liking her,” Baumbach said. “That you understand her is what’s important.”
“It’s a family where if you show your belly, people are going to pounce,” he added. “And no one pounces as often or as recklessly as Margot, a seething bundle of anger and self-loathing who swings unpredictably between aggressive and passive-aggressive attacks.”
There’s a lot of nods to French newish-waver Eric Rohmer too (we recommend his Criterion boxset).
Mr. Baumbach has never been shy about his Francophilia — “Squid” nods to Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Eustache and Louis Malle — and the on-the-fly immediacy of “Margot” owes something to the French New Wave house style, “the way they allowed for rough edges,” he said. Eric Rohmer’s “vacation movies,” he acknowledged, were an inspiration for “Margot.” The film’s title and the name of Ms. Leigh’s character pay dutiful homage to Mr. Rohmer’s “Pauline at the Beach.”
One review we read which we can’t remember offhand (maybe it’s the Times one?) basically said (and we’re paraphrasing), the film had a dreading, almost “anxiety-provoking” quality to it and it does, but it’s thrilling in a way that you feel like you’re peering through the window of a real family dinner go totally haywire. It’s really incredible how Baumbach captures this so we authentically, not to mention how he writes so well for the female voice.
Baumbach’s next three projects include writing with Wes Anderson again (co-writing an animated version of Roald Dahl’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox”) and he’s been hired to write an adaptation of “The Emperor’s Children,” a NewYork literati piece for Ron Howard (yeah, we know, disturbing, right?) and then another, untitled original screenplay that will again star his wife Jennifer Jason Leigh which he hopes to direct next year. “At some point it’s going to add up to some sort of strange police blotter sketch if all these things in my films are true,” he said. “My hope is that I will make enough movies that they can’t all conceivably be autobiographical.”
“Margot At The Wedding” opens up in limited release this weekend. We can’t recommend it highly enough (we’ll probably go see it again). Oh and lest we forget, the soundtrack is excellent and with lots of tastefully chosen tunes by Fleetwood Mac (actually that one’s just in the movie), Dinosaur Jr., Donovan, the dbs, Blondie and more.
