Noah Baumbach’s best characters are beautiful messes – complicated, deeply flawed, self-destructive. The problem with Margot at the Wedding, about a dysfunctional family of artists and oddballs, is that Baumbach can’t make this freak show sufficiently sympathetic or relatable. Undoubtedly, he feels a kinship for this unruly clan – he’s too clever to create these characters just for the sake of hating them – but he’s not able to transfer that affinity to the audience.
Although a successful writer, Margot (Nicole Kidman) has a history of family issues. She has a fractured relationship with her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and is considering leaving her husband. When Margot and her teenage son visit Pauline for her impending wedding with Malcolm (Jack Black), a disheveled man-child who considers himself a professional letter writer, barely latent hostility explodes into a weekend of non-stop arguments and tantrums. At times Margot at the Wedding‘s misunderstandings, chaos, and sheer physicality borders on screwball zaniness, a comedic genre which Baumbach eventually paid more fitting tribute to in Mistress America.
Baumbach is particularly adept at capturing the egotistical yearnings and confused flailings of young adulthood (Kicking and Screaming and Frances Ha are the best examples). There’s an element of that in Margot at the Wedding‘s awkward teenagers, but they mostly take a back seat to mid-life crises and resentments. It’s dangerous territory, difficult to pull off without devolving into priviledged whining or entitled bickering, and Baumbach straddled that fine line with more satirical precision in Greenberg. You’ve likely noticed a pattern here – Baumbach has done all this before and after, but better. The fact that his films are so thematically and tonally similar only serves to highlight the flaws of lesser efforts like Margot at the Wedding.
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