Comedy in 'Margot' is so dark it hurts
There are comedies of manners; why can't there be comedies of misbehavior? There's no better way to describe "Margot at the Wedding," a pitch-black farce about two intellectual sisters who manage to turn a theoretically joyous occasion into a game of scorpions in a bottle.
Nicole Kidman deserves some kind of bravery merit badge for taking the title role. Margot is a real original, part brittle Yankee and part pit bull, a sort of Katharine Hepburn character with a mean streak a mile wide. We know right off we're not supposed to identify with our protagonist — who could warm up to a woman who wears a pink bucket hat? — but you'd never predict how unpleasant she becomes as the story progresses.
In a weird way, it's a seasonal mood-brightener. No matter how trying your family holiday get-togethers might be, this movie will convince you that things could be much worse.
Writer-director Noah Baumbach's follow up to "The Squid and the Whale" is another tale about the agonies of growing up. Margot and her son, Claude (Zane Pais), visit the Atlantic coast home of her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), for her marriage to Malcolm (Jack Black), an unemployed musician. We see a lot of the interaction between the adults from Claude's viewpoint, and these self-absorbed creatures with their old, undying resentments are like a zoo display of venomous reptiles.
Baumbach presents childhood as a dangerous business that anyone has to be very strong to escape. But adulthood is no cinch, either. Margot and Pauline snipe at each other with pretentious therapy-speak, and Malcolm, surveying his blubbery nudity in the mirror, emits wails of insecurity. He's obviously on the verge of a premarital freakout, and when it arrives, it's a corker. Margot's marriage is disintegrating and she makes no effort to hide that from Claude, which doesn't cheer the visit up any.
The film aims for a very bitter comic tone, the sort of thing David Mamet or Jules Feiffer or Neil LaBute might write in a bad mood. The women are egotistical monsters and the men are desperately weak or lascivious monsters (except for Claude's father, sympathetically played by John Turturro).
And yet there's a jaundiced wit to the dialogue and a grace to the performances that had me laughing almost against my will. "Margot" is either the funniest tragedy of the year or the bleakest comedy. It's not funny ha-ha, it's funny ouch-ouch.
TITLE: “Margot at the Wedding”CAST: Nicole Kidman, Halley Feiffer, John Turturro, Jack Black, Flora Cross, Ashlie Atkinson, Ciaran Hinds, Elena Anaya, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Zane ParisDIRECTOR: Noah BaumbachRATED: R for sexual content and languageGRADE: * * * 1/2 (out of 5)
