Margot At The Wedding

After his charmingly painful Kicking and Screaming (1995) and Mr. Jealousy (1998) and his more painfully autobiographical The Squid and the Whale (2005), writer-director Noah Baumbach announces No more Mr. Nice Guy in this hysterically hyperbolic and unpleasant if still witty dissection of family traumas. The neurotically judgmental title heroine (Nicole Kidman), a successful fiction writer, takes her son (Zane Pais) to the country to attend the wedding of her estranged, New Agey sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to a confused slacker she’s recently met (Jack Black). Apart from John Turturro in a cameo, all the characters are monsters and/or basket cases (and the next-door neighbors are a nightmare projection of the family’s class and ethnic fears). Though no family on earth is likely to be as dysfunctional as this one, realism is no longer Baumbach’s register. It’s almost as if Woody Allen had shifted his allegiance from Bergman to Strindberg while tripling his skill in handling actors. R, 93 min. (JR)

This entry was posted in Featured Texts. Bookmark the permalink.