Margot at the wedding: Review

There’s a word that I dislike when it’s used in film criticism, and that word is “pretentious.” Too often, it’s a convenient shortcut in reviewing films that deal with heavy issues in styles not easily accessible or enjoyable. To use four examples, Ingmar Bergman, Wong Kar-wai, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Federico Fellini have been dismissed by detractors as being “pretentious,” perhaps because their uncompromising narratives require concentration and attention from the audience, and they are serious—some would say earnest— in the messages they try to get across.

Margot at the Wedding, the new film by Noah Baumbach, is certainly more accessible than an Antonioni film, but it is earnest and heavy with quirky elements, and has thus been dismissed in some circles as being pretentious.

Take Lou Lumenick’s review in the New York Post: “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 and the Whale.” I quote from Lumenick’s review because I find its superficiality interesting. Lumenick doesn’t go into depth about why he dislikes the movie. He’s more content to rattle off oneliners and stock clichés (“navelgazing bore,” “ham-fisted,” “faux- French”) without justification, and he believes that Baumbach and his films are just plain self-indulgent. “Baumbach seems to be using his movies to endlessly work through his childhood problems,” he writes. How dare Baumbach use film as a medium for personal expression!

While Margot at the Wedding doesn’t have the bitter humour of The Squid and the Whale, one of the most intensely autobiographical films of recent years, its melancholy depiction of two disappointed and vaguely resentful sisters has a strong ring of truth.

Now in her late thirties and no longer as desirable as in her youth, Penelope (Jennifer Jason Leigh) announces that she is having a child with her fiancé Malcolm (Jack Black), a complete loser. She invites her sister Margot (Nicole Kidman) to the wedding, and Margot is less than impressed with Malcolm: “He’s like the guys we rejected when we were sixteen.” But Margot has her own issues—she’s in the midst of an affair—and tension develops between the competitive sisters.

I wish the film were more Ingmar Bergman than Wes Anderson. Its weakest aspect is, unfortunately, Jack Black, whose lowbrow comic sensibility is at odds with the more restrained work by Kidman and Leigh. There’s a scene, for example, near the end of the film where Black has to cry, and he does so in a very comically exaggerated way.

No one in the world cries like Black does in this movie, and in a film that aims for reality, his performance sticks out like a sore thumb. I found Margot at the Wedding compelling in the way it dealt with family dynamics in honest ways, and for being a mostly believable film about disappointment, compromise, and alienation. But this movie isn’t immediately satisfying. Its characters are hard to like and there’s little reward of closure or easy emotional cues because, frankly, that’s life. If that’s also “pretentious,” then so be it