Margot at the Wedding (2007)

Purely Joyful Movie!

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Margot and her teenage son are supposed to attend Pauline, Margot's sister wedding. They travel from Manhattan to the countryside, where Pauline lives. Margot and Pauline have a troubled relationship and haven't meet for a while.Other characters in the movie are Pauline's daughter from a previous marriage, her live-in boyfriend Malcolm (a creepy Jack Black), Margot ex-lover, who conveniently lives close to Pauline and a few nasty neighbors.I read in other reviews that Margot is supposed to be "sophisticated and accomplished" and superior to Pauline, but to me they both looked like bums, badly dressed and bad mannered.Also, I hardly ever felt so detached watching a movie. I usually like or dislike intensely, but in this movie characters behaved in such a totally alien way that they could have belonged to a different species. Although I understood what they said, I had no clue to why the acted the way they did.A silly open ending leaves you exactly where you started. And by the way, only in movies female characters drop their bags and run away. Nobody wants to be bothered with having to get extra keys and copies of all your documents, let alone an allegedly "sophisticated" Newyorker.Finally, the lack of soundtrack and proper lighting, terrible shots (with lots of back-lights), faded color and weird costumes made this look like an amateurish, pseudo-documentary made in the 70s. I got wise too late that Baumbach was the director, at the time still married to Jason Leigh, in the role of Pauline. A role that at present would be played by Gerwig, the permanent female fixture of all his more recent movies (of which I watched two, both of which sucked... hence my remark of having noticed too late his being the director of this other turd)

Any attempt I make to describe this film isn't going to do it justice, in short: if you like dark and powerful films then watch this, you won't regret it. In long: I was bored so I watched this with 0 hype on cable. I watch 1-2 films per day almost every day but I was completely blown away by how powerful the screenplay is on this film. It features Nicole Kidman, someone who wasn't on my radar of good actresses and Jack Black - a slapstick comedian, what on earth was I suppose to expect here? The reality is that the screenplay for this film could be performed by a twig alongside a slice of apple pie and the twig would win an Oscar. It's an extremely dark depiction of a relatively normal event, a wedding, through the interactions of half a dozen flawed adults and the three children that they drag, kicking and screaming, through childhood.The writers really paint the complexity of everyday people, these aren't people that have extreme mental disorders - these are people you work with that often find themselves thrust together and bound by the most semantic of bonds, family, friends, marriage. Nicole Kidman blew me away as 'Margot', arguably the most flawed of the characters but by no means the protagonist or villain. Jack Black really suppressed his usual over-the-top slapstick to give a subtle performance of a serious character.I was watching avidly until the end which was like a punch in the face. I mean in the middle of a scene it just says 'Fin'. This film should have been twice as long as it was! Maybe I was just so into the film that I didn't want it to end, either way I make it an 85 minute film when I wished it was over 2 hours.

This is a fascinating fly-on-the-wall film about dysfunctional sisters, written and directed by Noah Baumbach, husband of Jennifer Jason Leigh, who plays one of the sisters. It is interesting to see Nicole Kidman, the other sister, wholly out-classed by Leigh, who acts circles round her. Kidman is not easy to steal scenes from, but Leigh does this without even trying. No matter how attractive, arch-browed, pensive, thoughtfully-leaning, and lens-loving Kidman is, no matter how many times she tilts her head to one side and invites our enraptured gaze, no matter how many screen tricks she pulls to make everybody watch her in preference to everybody else, she fails. Leigh just has the magic. We stare at her instead, even when she slouches, looks a mess, and is after all only a tiny creature compared to the more statuesque Kidman. I declare an interest in saying this, however, because I suspect Leigh must be my favourite actress. And so maybe I want to justify my opinion of her by always insisting she puts others in the shade. Anyone who saw her in WASHINGTON SQUARE (1997, see my review) however cannot possibly deny that she is a genius, can they? Is it possible for anyone not to recognise that Leigh is way out there ahead of the pack? There are other things in her favour besides her talent. She has integrity. I can never forgive Jodie Foster and Julia Roberts for appearing in those two horrible films PRETTY WOMAN (1990) and THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991). I regard those films not merely as wicked but as evil. One of them glorified prostitution and made us think it was OK for the cute little girl next door-type to be a hooker, and the other glorified a cannibal psychopath and made it both fashionable and acceptable to kill people and eat them. Am I the only person in the world who recognises the immorality of those films? Are we so decadent in our society that we are numb to the inadmissible? Jennifer Jason Leigh rejected both of those roles and refused to appear in those films, so that Jodie Foster and Julia Roberts were left to pick up the vomit and drink it. Leigh therefore qualifies as a heroine, not just as a brilliant actress. As for this film, the sound quality is not always up to scratch because the film's 'French New Wave' directorial style meant the camera was always moving around and it is difficult to mike people when they are intimately mumbling to each other while the camera keeps circling and dodging. I would say that the directing did manage a fresh and alive quality by all this frenetic shifting about, and it did succeed in making this a very desperate 'slice of life' indeed. There is plenty of black comedy, but then, when did families ever not generate black comedy in their daily lives? The other outstanding performance in this film is by child actor Zane Pais, who plays the boy who is ostensibly Kidman's son but more probably the son of Leigh, who could not cope at the time and handed him over to her sister to bring up instead. Although this is only hinted at, it seems the most likely answer to some riddles of the story. I wonder why Baumbach played it down so much. Pais is absolutely brilliant, and his performance goes far towards making this film work. I wonder why he has only appeared in this one film. He has a strange androgynous quality, and at first with his long hair I thought he was a girl. I thought that John Turturro and Ciaran Hinds as the two men in Kidman's life were both pretty creepy, but perhaps they were meant to be. Flora Cross was very good as the young girl Ingrid, but she didn't have much of a scripted part. As for Jack Black, well, what do I say? He was very good of course, funny and engaging. But he is no looker and how are we expected to believe that a gorgeous gal like Leigh would want to marry him? Was Baumbach afraid to cast his wife opposite a more convincing love match? The casting of all the men in this film is bizarre to say the least, and one wonders what Baumbach was getting at. The neighbours from hell named Vogler were convincing, but I think overdone. I did not understand why it was necessary to cut down that nice tree. There are numerous aspects of the film which puzzled me. Well, it was Baumbach's 'thing' and directors will be directors and director-writers will be director-writers, you know how it is.

Don't waste your time or money-this one stinks really REALLY BADLY!! This film makes the Royal(flush it down the toilet)Tenenbaums look like a masterpiece!! The only reason I rented this smelly turd was because we live in the very town-East Quogue, where some of it was filmed...so naturally we had to check it out. Boy, what a mistake that was!! Can even remember having Main Street(Montauk Hwy) closed down for a day or two while they filmed-thanks Noah, the inconvenience and intrusion definitely wasn't worth it!! Plus they shot some other scenes nearby, I believe it might have been Red Creek-a really beautiful area-such a waste of some great scenery. I think I even stood behind the food crew on the "express" checkout line one morning at the local supermarket-I swear!! (buying what seemed like a half million dollars worth of food-at least ten cases of bottled water, must have been for Nicole's sustenance). I even saw the van as they loaded it up, I guess Hollywood has to make a big production out of everything. Sorry-I'm beginning to sound like this movie-haha. Anyway...This film pushed our patience, in the sense of "when is this movie going to start getting interesting". My wife and I unfortunately had to wait until nearly the end before the one scene that showcased our tiny town revealed itself. Ouch, what an agonizing wait. Even my wife thought this was painful to watch, and she gravitates towards these kind of flicks. Awful, AWFUL dialogue. Silly, banal bickering one minute, followed by seemingly hollow, half-hearted apologies and reconciliations the next. Over and OVER and OVER again-the whole movie was pretty much that. I'm not sure what Baumbach was thinking when he wrote the screenplay, and then directed this junk. Sure he had some success with "The Squid and the Whale"-which we both liked... But I guess he thinks he can just expand the wackiness-dysfunctional-kooky factor and sprinkle in some dull, laughless humor and voilà, he's got a viewable movie-well WRONG!! This movie tries too hard to be off-center, dysfunctional and wacky. I agree with other posters that while some people find these introspectives of nutjobs' lives amusing, most of us find them dull, boring and almost unlifelike. Main stream folks have their problems, but not like this.Want more? Really dopey dialogue throughout most of this film(did I just say that-well it's worth repeating), bad casting-read Jack Black, that Pais kid was rather pathetic too, horrible editing at times, several shots that just totally did not match up, hey that should never happen in this day and age, and a lousy plot... This film is just a total waste of time and space(on anyone's DVD shelf). Avoid this stinker at any cost!! Even a 99-cent rental!!!