“It’s safe to say that before The Squid and the Whale, I would have been arrested for trying to have a coffee with Nicole Kidman,” quips writer/director Noah Baumbach at a roundtable interview during the Toronto International Film Festival.
He’s still breathing that sigh of relief occasioned by how relatively easy it was to not only make his latest feature, Margot at the Wedding, but to also land a member of Tinseltown royalty as one of his psychoanalytic subjects. “This is coming off a five-year process of trying to get The Squid and the Whale made, where I couldn’t get anybody to finance it or to be in it or anything.”
Of course, Baumbach shows no regrets for the half-decade spent on getting Squid to hit screens. The cracked family portrait inspired by Baumbach’s own thoroughly impressed both critics and audiences. After the way The Squid and the Whale played out, it makes sense that studios are giving Baumbach a smoother ride in developing his next project.
What few difficulties Baumbach faced developing Margot at the Wedding are summed up in his acquisition of Kidman. “It was the easiest experience I’ve ever had in the movie business. I finished the script. She was my first choice. I had a coffee with her. We’re both shy people, so it was kind of a quiet conversation. She took the script home and I got a call the next morning saying ‘I’d like to do it.’”
In the film, Kidman plays Margot, a pampered and educated bitch, and an author of no small regard who’s escaping a marriage, teenage son in tow. The two visit the East Coast to attend the wedding of Margot’s sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh, also Mrs. Noah Baumbach). While Pauline looks to Margot for approval of her unorthodox choice for a husband (a lumberjack- like wannabe musician played by Jack Black), she is also aware that her sadistically cruel sister has a venomous tongue that can make wedding bells ring sour.
Although audiences may be looking for similarities to Squid, the differences between the two projects are what fascinate Baumbach. “Margot unfolds in a way where I don’t think you know where it’s going,” Baumbach elaborates. “Not to say that Squid is predictable, but it is easier to find your bearings in that movie. And Margot in a lot of ways is about not being able to find your bearings. It’s about being thrown into an experience that’s fraught with all of these expectations and anxieties and relationships that keep shifting and turning.”
Certainly those seeking intrinsic similarities won’t have to look too far, as Baumbach’s writing inevitably betrays characters present in his work since 1995’s Kicking and Screaming. The high-minded intelligentsia that populate Baumbach’s oeuvre are distinguished in their ability to wield a philosophy and psychology as both shield and sword, while hiding their truly feeble selves. Coffee-table chats end up in deconstructive psychobabble where everyone can prescribe themselves and others with mental symptoms, for better or for worse.
Baumbach’s familiarity with such academic types (such as his own literary parents) informs what is becoming a trademark writing style. “I grew up around a lot of writers and teachers,” recalls Baumbach. “So they’re people I know, and people I just find myself writing about. I am interested in people who are articulate and can express themselves in sophisticated ways, and know a lot about themselves, because there’s always stuff you don’t know too. It’s interesting to me how seeming rationality and sophistication can hide chaos.”
Margot at the Wedding opens in Toronto on November 23.
