Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach, 2007): USA

Reviewed by Byron Potau.

Great Noah Baumbach films appear to be few and far between.  After his debut success with the brilliant Kicking and Screaming it took him ten years before his next great film, The Squid and the Whale.  We can only hope that Margot at the Wedding is just a stumbling block on the way to Baumbach’s next great film.
The film follows Margot, played by Nicole Kidman, who goes to her sister Pauline’s house in anticipation of Pauline’s wedding and proceeds to annoy everyone, worst of all the audience.  Her constant hypocritical judging of everyone around her, coupled with zero likable characters make for a very hard watch.  Margot is so self absorbed and bitchy that she actually chides her husband, who came to Pauline’s house to try and reconcile with Margot, for helping a woman and her dog, who has just been hit by a car, by taking them to a vet.  She has the nerve to say to her husband, in front of the woman who is holding her ailing dog, that the woman is annoying her.  It is difficult to imagine that the people around her will put up with her, or that her husband could possibly want her back.  She is simply a wreck of a person and there are few people she comes in contact with that she does not antagonize.  The film gets no better than this and nearly every major character bursts into tears at some point, but we do not sympathize with them because they have annoyed us to no end.
Despite a good cast which includes Jack Black, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, who again gets naked for the umpteenth time in a film, they are dealing with mediocre material which seldom rises above the level of bad reality television.  We can only hope there are not too many more films like this left in him before his next brilliant outing.  As for Margot at the Wedding, there is no need to attend.