Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
Margot Zeller is a short story writer with a sharp wit and an even sharper tongue. On the eve of her estranged sister Pauline's wedding to unemployed musician/artist/depressive Malcolm at the family seaside home, Margot shows up unexpectedly to rekindle the sisterly bond and offer her own brand of support. What ensues is a nakedly honest and subversively funny look at family dynamics.
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What critics compared Margot at the Wedding to
Superficially, it's awfully suggestive of Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding from last year, although if you take away the wedding backdrop and the detail that the drama centers around two sisters, there's really nothing to connect the two films more than any random pair of movies about family dynamics.
Certainly, I enjoyed Rachel Getting Married a whole lot better than its evil twin in form and theme, Noah Baumbach’s grungy, mean-spirited, relentlessly cold Margot at the Wedding.
(You may even think you just saw it last year; Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding had a remarkably similar setup.)
In another recent nuptials film, Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, nearly every encounter is engineered for us to cringe at the characters’ monstrous egotism.
Facile comparisons to Margot at the Wedding may inevitably follow Rachel Getting Married, yet unlike Noah Baumbach’s aggressively unpleasant portrait of sibling dysfunction, Jonathan Demme’s tale of a junkie who exits rehab to attend the wedding of her older sister is – despite a sometimes grating, troubled protagonist – big-hearted, generous and hopeful.
Noah Baumbach has not strayed from the topics of marriage or divorce before, tackling such subjects in the films Margot At The Wedding and The Squid and The Whale, respectively.
Dramas of domestic discord, they’re centered on divorce (The Squid and the Whale), misalliances and sisterly strife (Margot at the Wedding), overbearing parents (The Meyerowitz Stories), and other assorted woes of often well-off unhappy families.
In that respect, Marriage Story is no different than The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding, Greenberg, or Frances Ha.
Noah Baumbach is no stranger to fraught relationships: The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding had characters who could say mean, cutting things about their family.
From his coming of age confessional about being raised by two narcissistic parents in The Squid and The Whale, to a lacerating profile of an affected writer visiting her sister in Margot at the Wedding, Baumbach has a knack for exposing our penchant for self-absorption, and in doing so, reflecting our struggle to find empathy.
Here, his unsparing eye is fixed on the dissolution of a marriage that looks not unlike his own to actress Jennifer Jason Leigh: a creative partnership (Leigh played key supporting parts in Margot at the Wedding and Greenberg , and the two of them co-wrote the latter’s story) between two successful artists with a young son (in real life, not an 8-year-old but an infant who was less than a year old when they filed their papers).
The glib stabs at Jean Eustache-like candor from The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding dont get any less hollow by being transplanted to California; worse, like that trip to India a few years back by modern cinemas other Little Lord Fauntleroy, the change of scenery doesnt so much get the director away from his safety zone as reveal an indifference to the rest of the world that matches that of his solipsistic characters.
It’s a bold, full-bodied performance that ranks alongside To Die For, Dogville, and Margot at the Wedding as the riskiest high-wire work of her career.
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His movies co-written with Gerwig are less acidic than the likes of Margot at the Wedding, but they’re sharp as hell, and wildly funny.
He began his career with a healthy suspicion of stardom, and anyone who thrilled to the deglammed indie vibes of “Margot at the Wedding” (2007) and “Greenberg” (2010) may find a slick, starry bauble such as “Jay Kelly” to be a journey into uncharted realms of schmaltz—a sentimental valley.
…seguramente confiando en que el talento del director de Margot y la boda a la hora de crear personajes, escribir sus líneas de diálogo, se mantendría en la cumbre.
Noah Baumbach at the helm, the writer-director who gave us The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding and Marriage Story.
…the caustic writer played by Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding…
It is co-written and directed by Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale, Margot at the Wedding).
These cycles of disappointment make up most of this funny-sad movie, co-written by Gerwig and director Noah Baumbach (Margot at the Wedding, The Squid and the Whale).
Noah Baumbach ( The Squid and the Whale , Margot at the Wedding ), directed Gerwig there, and he’s behind the camera again here, working from a script they wrote together.
In that context, Gerwig and this film, which she co-wrote with director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding), might be judged a small success.
Baumbach has had a series of off-kilter films, such as "The Squid and the Whale", "Margot at the Wedding" and "Greenberg".
Gerwig graduated to the mainstream when Baumbach, writer-director of such angst-ridden family dramas as The Squid and the Whale (2005) and Margot at the Wedding (2007), cast her opposite Ben Stiller in the critical hit Greenberg (2010).
The rest of the ensemble is like an explosion of talent, with Samantha Morton (2002's " Minority Report "), Michelle Williams (2008's " Deception "), Catherine Keener (2008's " Hamlet 2 "), Hope Davis (2008's " Charlie Bartlett "), Emily Watson (2002's " Punch-Drunk Love "), Dianne Wiest (2007's " Dan in Real Life "), Jennifer Jason Leigh (2007's " Margot at the Wedding ") and Tom Noonan (2008's " Snow Angels ") all delivering knockout supporting performances that stay with the viewer.
The appearance of Jennifer Jason Leigh as the lesbian love of Caden's ex-wife reminds one of the similar random weirdness of Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding" but it just starts getting ridiculous when Diane Wiest shows up to take over the role of Caden, as Caden becomes an actor in his own production.
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John Turturro (2007's " Margot at the Wedding ") and Rob Schneider (2006's " The Benchwarmers ") are annoying and forgettable as antagonists Phantom and Salim.
But his script, penned with the equally idiosyncratic Noah Baumbach (Margot at the Wedding, 2007; The Squid and the Whale, 2005), peaks then creaks.
Anderson, co-writing with Noah Baumbach ("Margot at the Wedding," "The Squid and the Whale"), captures the wry wit of Dahl's writing while also winking at the audience with satirical edginess -- such as using "cuss" as an all-purpose substitute for swear words (as in "the cuss you are!").
In its swift, sublime 87 minutes, Anderson and his cowriter, Noah Baumbach (Margot at the Wedding), have taken the gist of Dahl's slim volume and expanded it into a sometimes funny, occasionally scary, always enchanting adventure that really, when you come down to it, is about the challenges all of us face in life.
But not for director Wes Anderson, and his coscreenwriter Noah Baumbach (who cowrote The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with Anderson, and is a filmmaker in his own right: Margot at the Wedding ).
Like the similar adolescent males whom Baumbach evoked with such empathy in The Squid and the Whale and Margot at the Wedding—their bodies changing at a frightening pace, the world's cruel realities assaulting them at fastball speed—the uncoordinated, diminutive Ash finds himself in the grips of his own existential dilemma, exacerbated by the arrival of his golden-boy cousin, Kristofferson.
The rest is pure Anderson, drawn from a screenplay by him and Noah Baumbach (who co-wrote "The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou" and wrote and directed "Margot at the Wedding." ) In Anderson's world, the carefree Mr. Fox feels pressure to be fantastic all the time.