..Gary
Dretzka
..Noah
Forrest
..Leonard
Klady
..R.J.
Matson
..David
Poland
..Douglas
Pratt
..Ray
Pride
..Michael
Wilmington
Margot
at the
Wedding
Directed
by Noah Baumbach
I was not the biggest fan of The Squid & The Whale. In fact,
among its many supporters, I was said to hate the film. I did not. I was
completely comfortable that I understood Noah Baumbach’s milieu
and his intentions. I appreciated the standout performances across the
board. And I laughed and winced during the film. My complaint was…
so what? How whinny would this guy be if he had a truly dysfunctional
family to deal with?
Margot At The Wedding is not the answer to this query.
This is not say that the film is not aspiring to convince us that we are watching the most dysfunctional people EVER. Still, just writing that title, with all of its French sophisticate pretentiousness and an inaccurate description of the film, makes me blanch a little after the fact.
The fact is, I could not have imagined how much of a failure a Baumbach screenplay could be after turning in such a well structured, character supported screenplay just a couple of years ago. And that is where the deep problem lies in this film. He gets a strong piece of low-key acting out of Nicole Kidman. His wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh, remains incapable of not baring her soul to my amazement in every role that she plays. Jack Black does a nice job until the screenplay turns nastily on his efforts to be more than a clown, demanding laughs by being funny and not by acting. And the rest of the cast, especially the kids, deliver all that is asked of them.
But while Baumbach proves himself more than capable of delivering a GenX sitcom, stealing laughs throughout the proceedings, he fails completely in his effort to make sense of all the different walking punchlines into which he turns his characters. It is the definition of bad dramaturgy to have to tell the audience over and over and over again what the meaning of the characters’ actions are. And that failure defines virtually the entire movie.
Without getting into detail here, this is a simple tale of the more traditionally attractive, more successful, higher strung sister who has estranged herself from her siblings and returning to the home that was left to her less traditionally attractive, less successful, about to settle sister. Tension and drama and laughs ensue. Along for the ride are the one child of each of the sisters (one boy and one girl, who look more like family than their mothers), the fiancé one is not-so-unhappily settling for, and an attractive neighbor man and his big breasted teenage daughter.
The pressure cooker is that the wedding is coming, the sisters haven’t been close in a while because they each like to poke at the other, and the city sister doesn’t approve of the fiancé one little bit. There is more, but you may choose to see this film and you should have the chance to discover the turns for yourself.
The problems start when each sister starts to define the other in ways the audience laughs at, but isn’t given any insight into. This makes pleasure a very temporary condition.
Allow me one small example that I think illustrates the problem that permeates the film. There is a sequence in which the family is gathered outside to have a casual lunch. The giant old tree that the girls grew up with looms over the yard. The tree is, like so many things, a recurring point of discussion that makes its symbolic value in the eyes of the screenwriter completely apparent… and never pays off effectively… the payoff that does come, almost comically movie cliché.
In any case, the presence of the tree leads to a discussion of how the city sister (Kidman) would fearlessly climb pretty much anything as a child. This leads to her being goaded into climbing the tree. The ultimate punchline is in the movie for your pleasure.
But let’s look before the punch. First, we have the metaphor of the more successful sister being a rabid climber. The joke would be very easy to overdo… but without the invocation of that metaphor, what is the frickin’ point? On the more literal level, we have Kidman taking up the challenge. Why? I don’t really care what the answer is. But the must be an answer or we are nowhere. Moreover, how incredibly silly is it to have this woman climbing a tree in tight linen pants and an expensive sweater and shirt? On what planet would she do this?
But more importantly, what does this sequence say about everyone involved? And if it is "just a joke," why is it in this film? Character comedy without depth is almost never successful. Even in the stupidest forms of comedy, motivation drives the laugh, which is why, for instance, the best of Adam Sandler is often the stupidest... because you know exactly why The Waterboy is behaving the way he is.
And of course there is a punchline that seems to save the sequence. But so what? Baumbach lost me because all he did was to reach for the closing punch.
You could claim that I am making too much out of too little, but the entire film is quite intentionally a house of cards with all Jokers. If you take the sugar out of the meringue, you can have the best of the other ingredients, but you will never have a meringue that feels right.
By comparison, look at The Squid & The Whale. My issues with that film were not unlike my issues with Crash. It did what it did well, but I didn’t care for what it wanted to do. But every character choice in TS&TW was motivated with great clarity. Extreme behaviors and wacko choices were made, but even when straining credulity, we could understand the back story of each choice without it ever being Basil Expositioned.
Mom bangs the younger, better looking, intellectually inferior tennis coach? Of course. Dad begs the college girl to put “it” in her mouth like a boy in a back seat? Yes… duh… yes. The younger son is acting out as he is also being twisted by puberty? Sure, I will buy him spreading his seed all over the library. The kid who is desperate in equal measure for positive and negative attention pretending he wrote a Zeppelin song? Sure. You can say it was a dumb move, but you can also argue he desperately wanted to be caught.
There was not a false note or an extreme/wacky reach in that entire film. In this one, Baumbach has Jack Black doing schtick from scene one to the end. What will you remember most from the film? Not memorable lines, but an insanely unlikely (without better set-up) scene of masturbation, another discussion of masturbation, and an unexpectedly bare ass and discussion of penis size. Yawn!
Baumbach the Writer daringly opens up a massive can of worms in the overall story arcs of this film. But he fails Baumbach the Director, who does a nice job with a great assist from D.P. Harris Savides, who seems to know when the scenes are going nowhere because he keeps punctuating them with the thinnest forms of humor.
I really didn’t think I would dislike this film as I did and honestly hoped that I would be getting on the Baumbach train this time. Instead, we got Friends With Money, aka a weak effort from a smart, interesting, somewhat overrated young writer/director who bit off more than they could really consider chewing. Baumbach may yet be the slacker Woody Allen. But he better get someone around him who will tell him the truth about the structure and basic storytelling issues when they turn up… or we will be seeing some TV series from Baumbach on HBO with lots of "shockingly raw sex" as his primary career driver before you can say, “Wasn’t that guy going to win a bunch of Oscars?
