Sister Soldiers On the Homefront

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The New York Sun

The affection that the director Noah Baumbach feels for his characters often surpasses the affectations he burdens them with. His best films make audiences care about tightly wound, self-involved people. But without a compelling emotional draw, “Margot at the Wedding,” which opens in the city tomorrow, feels like a cold-hearted character study.

Nicole Kidman stars as the title character, a talented short-story writer who lashes out at everyone within earshot. Her Margot is all sharp edges and contradictions, at times needy, solitary, and cruel. Her intellect is intended to outshine her flaws, but we are not privy to her strengths on-screen. As the story begins, Margot travels with her adolescent son Claude (Zane Pais) to her old family home in the Hamptons to attend the wedding of her sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and her misreading of every situation begins at once. In the opening scene, Claude sits next to the wrong woman on the train, but rather than appreciate the awkward moment privately, Margot starts to make contact with the woman and worsens the situation. Claude later takes a break from her oppressive presence to scream into the noise between the train cars. The scene promises an interesting mother-son dynamic, but the film’s emotional arc never travels much further than this point.

The characters in the film are alternately drawn to and repelled by Margot, but it’s hard to see why they come back for more. At one point, Pauline tells Claude: “It’s hard to find people in the world you love more than your family.” The statement rings hollow — the emotions displayed on-screen seem less motivated by love than by habit.

And we never learn how these habits formed. The familiarity that Mr. Baumbach brought to post-college life in “Kicking and Screaming” and Brooklyn adolescence in “The Squid and the Whale” is absent. His characters here have broken out of the mold of familiar stereotype, but they lack details that would help audiences understand their motivations.

Ms. Kidman plays a successful, affluent, and beautiful woman, with emotional problems that border on clinical. Though the actress has a gift for portraying neurotic fragility, her Margot lacks empathy. It’s difficult to overcome the coldness that inspires the selfishly critical statements she unloads on her sister and child.

“The Squid and the Whale” also focused on parents whose neuroses encroached on the lives of their children, but the strength of that film lay in viewing the events from the perspective of Walt, the adolescent son of divorcing parents. On the cusp of adulthood, Walt worshipped his self-involved father, but still held the promise that he would avoid repeating the same mistakes in his own life.

Claude plays a similar role here, and Mr. Pais reacts to the abusive words of Ms. Kidman’s character with exquisite candor, capturing the confusion of life on the cusp of adulthood. In awe of his mother, Claude wants desperately to please her, yet he is beginning to understand that her behavior is often unacceptable. But Claude is a passive accessory in this drama, as helpless in the force of the action as the audience. Ms. Leigh begins to fill the emotional void created by Margot’s domineering presence, but we are brought back to Margot again by the end.

Ms. Leigh seems much more at ease shifting between the failings and achievements that her director and real-life husband cultivates in his characters. Her Pauline is a beautiful if drifting woman, intelligent but forever in the shadow of her successful sister. Pauline yearns for affection and thinks she has found it with her fiancé, Malcolm (Jack Black). Mr. Black similarly maneuvers Mr. Baumbach’s persistent shifts in his artist character. Malcolm is witty and engaging, but it is unclear if he lacks ambition or talent. He might be a chump. As Margot puts it, he’s not ugly, “just completely unattractive.”

While scenes between Pauline and Malcolm hint at a complicated and worthwhile relationship, the main focus — Margot — remains baffling. In “The Squid and the Whale,” Walt’s younger brother’s public masturbation, his father’s affair with one of his students, and his own plagiarism were explicable, if not excusable, thanks to Mr. Baumbach’s deft and empathetic writing.

Here, many characters show promise and some scenes are well-captured, but the action never gels. Many scenes bring unmoored cinematic set pieces, but not much life, to the story: A large, dying tree that causes problems with the neighbors must inevitably come down; scattershot interactions with the unfriendly neighbors add hints of Leatherface to the marital planning; Margot romantically leaves all of her belongings in a parking lot while running to catch a bus out of town.

In one motif, Pauline’s daughter, Ingrid (Flora Cross), and Claude bond over their penchant for leaving dead skin in public places. Ingrid informs Claude that she once left a bit of her skin in a movie theater so it could watch movies forever. The attempt at sentimentalism fails, leaving only the impression of an uncomfortable overshare — an area in which “Margot” revels, but one that is often not enjoyable to watch.

mkeane@nysun.com


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