Margot at the Wedding

What’s the Story?

"I can't say I have a whole lot of hope for the whole thing," says Margot (Nicole Kidman) at the start of MARGOT AT THE WEDDING. She and her adolescent son, Claude (Zane Pais), are on their way to Margot's childhood home in the Hamptons, where her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) now lives with her fiancc, Malcolm (Jack Black). Unfortunately, Margot's sense of foreboding influences the film as much as her sister's upcoming nuptials. A successful New York-based writer, Margot repeatedly belittles Pauline's choice of Malcolm while also framing herself as a victim; her own marriage, to Jim (John Turturro), is in trouble, though she hasn't yet revealed this to her son. And though Pauline, who's been estranged from her sister for years, wants to believe that her relationship with Malcolm is the real thing, she worries that her own insecurity and loneliness make her impossible to love.

Is It Any Good?

At the center of this maelstrom of immature adults and kids who compete for attention and resent one another is Claude. His perspective more or less grounds Noah Baumbach's latest investigation of long-festering family dysfunction, and so his changing attitudes toward his mother, aunt, and Malcolm -- as well as his cousin Ingrid (Flora Cross) and teenage housekeeper Maisy (Hallet Feiffer) -- tend to shape viewers'.

The film turns into a series of arguments and dire revelations; each is well acted, but their accumulation eventually feels crushing. When Margot at last decides to send Claude off alone on a bus, his simultaneous reluctance to go and desire to trust her is heartbreaking. That it's captured in a few moments in which he and his mother are at last not talking, not trying so desperately to order their feelings through language suggests at last that there's hope for them. Smartly, though, the film keeps still at last on Claude's face, letting you imagine his future.