I went to see Margot at the Wedding, Noah Baumbach's new film starring Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh as estranged sisters. The movie is polarizing critics in that "love it or hate it" sorta way. I loved it. Baumbach, who wrote and directed The Squid and The Whale, has an ear for devastating dialogue. His characters wield words like cutting instruments and watching Kidman and Leigh slice and dice each other is both difficult to watch and liberating. Critics who don't like the film have said the two sisters are so loathsome as to be unwatchable. Completely untrue.
Kidman plays Margot, a writer who has mined her families tragedies and foibles to create numerous bestsellers while living a heady, literary life in Manhattan. Her sister, Pauline (Leigh), is just as smart, but has gone down a different path. She still lives in the family home, located on some Bergman-esque seashore that is never identified. Pauline is getting married to a jobless loser named Malcolm (Jack Black mostly out of his depth) and invites Margot to the wedding. The two haven't seen each other in years and it's suggested that Margot only accepted the invitation to see an ex-lover living nearby and to find a new topic for her next novel. When she meets Malcolm, Margot sets about trying to talk her sister out of the marriage. "He's not ugly," Margot says sweetly, "he's just completely unattractive. We were ignoring guys like him when we were sixteen."
The plot is mostly seen from Margot's androgynous adolescent son, Claude, who she treats like an adult, complete with cutting remarks about his manners, appearance and lack of ambition. It's Kidman's best role since The Hours and she finds an amazing balance between the character's vulnerability and nearly pathological need to one up everyone and everything. Kidman's not running around like a loony -- she often underplays it and lets her expressive face and Baumbach's searing dialogue do the work for her. This is also Leigh's best role in ages, a smarter variation on the usual "prostitute on pills" character that has become her trademark.
It's not an easy film to watch, mainly because it cuts so close to the bone on the dynamics of dysfunctional families. The ending will leave a few people perplexed, but it's a better than expected resolution without neatly tying up all the strings. Give it a shot.