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GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 11/15/07)

Writer-director Noah Baumbach's films are so relentlessly peopled by awful individuals that one may well wonder if Baumbach is acquainted with anybody who's just kind of a simple pleasure to hang out with. Margot at the Wedding, his followup to 2005's widely praised The Squid and the Whale, stars Nicole Kidman as one of those literary types you love to hate — a Manhattan-based author of short stories — who is also possibly the World's Worst Mother, Non-Physically Abusive Division.

The picture, which has an extremely apt, perpetually overcast look — all white skies and dim dusty light through dirty kitchen windows (the picture was shot by Harris Savides, who imparts a similar purposeful dinginess to the very different American Gangster) begins with Margot and her painfully awkward teen son Claude (Pais, in a cringe-worthy accurate portrayal of the most wondrous stage of adolescence) not much enjoying a train ride out to the Hamptons. Margot's a tetchy, self-absorbed know-it-all with a vast barrage of weapons of emotional destruction in her arsenal, and she's ruthless and thoughtless in both how she uses them and who she uses them on. There's her needy, slightly bovine sister Pauline (Leigh), who's thrilled that Margot, from whom she's been estranged, has ventured out to their ancestral home for the first time in years; there's Malcolm (Black), the opinionated but largely amiable loser Pauline is about to marry, there's one writer Margot's married to (Turturro) and another she's having an affair with (Hinds). (On the phone to her husband, apropos her faithlessness, Margot exasperatedly says, "This is happening, and you need to get your mind around it," a line that nicely sums up her particular brand of insufferableness.) There are also varied neighbors and relatives whose faces she likes to get into, but mostly it's Claude who bears the brunt of her hatefulness. Margot loves to be the hip, cool mom who confides intimate, inappropriate stuff to her kid and hopes for reciprocation; the way she works this dynamic with Claude is frequently just jaw-dropping in both its inappropriateness and passive-aggressive fury. And Claude can't get a break even away from mom, given the moist creepiness (evoked by Baumbach with a been-there acuity) he seems to find around every corner of a particularly boonies-like section of the Hamptons this film is set in.

Kidman's facial muscles, the recent seeming immobilization of which has been the topic of much tabloid speculation, work well for her steely performance here; her Margot is never creepier than when she's trying to fix a "nice" smile on her mug (not that she does so terribly often). Leigh plays the haggard, defensive, just-wants-to-be-loved sibling to painful perfection, while Black ruthlessly deconstructs his stoner goofball persona to reveal the needy, pathetic no-lifer who lurks not very far under the skin of most such types.

You'd think this would make for one bummer of a picture, particularly given that all the characters are both thoroughly miserable and misery-inducing in their own ways, but Margot is a fleet, strangely enjoyable film, animated by the acuity of Baumbach's perceptions and — this helps a lot — the frequent laugh-out-loud wit of his dialogue. The filmmaker is only gaining in assurance as both a writer and director; this picture brought to mind Rohmer's work of the early to mid-'80s, if Rohmer were more depressive and had a nastier social circle.

— Glenn Kenny