Margot At The Wedding

[MacGuffin]

Trailer

Release Date: October 19th, 2007 (limited)

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Black, John Turturro, Flora Cross 

Directed by: Noah Baumbach (The Squid And The Whale)

Premise: A mother and her son visit her sister over the weekend, in a story about coming to terms with one's family in distress, and oneself.

[edison]

[JG]

I'm in. 

[Pubrick]

as noted here the poster has an Interiors thing going, and the headroom of Scenes from a Marriage.

there's also the sister element from Hannah and Her Sisters, and the editing style of Husbands and Wives (at least in that one bit of the trailer).. and the weather from both of those films.

[Ghostboy]

And the love interest from The Holiday.

[Pubrick]

And the love interest from The Holiday.

which was directed by nancy meyers who also directed Something's Gotta Give which starred Diane Keaton.. and so the woody influence remains obvious.

[w/o horse]

The trailer for this made me blush with excitement.

[Pubrick]

The trailer for this made me blush with excitement.

which is exactly what annie hall does when alvy and the rest of us fall for her after tennis.

also, nicole is wearing her hat

[MacGuffin]

Margot at the Wedding
Source: Entertainment Weekly

Adults in Noah Baumbach's movies — especially his celebrated last film, The Squid and the Whale, and his new family drama about the fractured relationship between two sisters — often behave poorly. They can be petty and casually cruel and scrape at their loved one's jugulars from across the dinner table. They're funny, too. You may see a lot of these messy people at home for Thanksgiving but rarely on film at the multiplex. After Nicole Kidman, who plays the neurotic, graspy Margot, and Jennifer Jason Leigh, her sister who's getting married, shot their first big scene together, they were both plagued with stomach pains from the sharp tension between their characters. The script captures ''the worst of all your family dynamics coming into play,'' says Leigh, ''and everyone's trying so hard to rise above past hurts.''

Jack Black, playing the fiancé, whom Margot frowns upon, might not seem an obvious fit for this complicated world. But he sought out Baumbach after seeing Squid, and the director took to him immediately. Leigh, usually cast as the fidgety, disturbed type, gets to tackle a breezy, warm woman for once. And Kidman, after a run of remakes, returns to what she describes as ''the tone of humor in To Die For.'' Leigh says the whole cast got on like family — just the strange kind that actually gets along.

[MacGuffin]

TIFF Interview: 'Margot at the Wedding' Director Noah Baumbach
Source: Cinematical

Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale, a semi-autobiographical film about a Brooklyn family's experience with divorce, was the sleeper indie hit of 2005, and after its success Baumbach shot to prominence as a director to watch. His highly anticipated follow-up effort, Margot at the Wedding, returns to similar themes of family love and loathing; it stars Nicole Kidman as Margot, a high-strung writer who, along with her son Claude (Zane Pais), goes on a pilgrimage of sorts to her childhood home, where her estranged sister (Baumbach's wife Jennifer Jason Leigh) is marrying an unemployed painter (Jack Black) she just met. Baumbach -- who, it must be noted, bears an uncanny resemblance to Adrien Brody -- sat down with us in Toronto to talk about New York, family dynamics and just what's up with all those masturbation scenes.

Cinematical: After Squid and the Whale, a lot of people looked at you as a Brooklyn artist, the way they might look at someone like Jonathan Lethem. Did you have any temptation to make another movie set in Brooklyn, or did you deliberately move away from that?

Noah Baumbach: It wasn't deliberate or not deliberate -- I started writing this movie and it became what it was. It wasn't a response to anything in particular. I feel a real connection to Brooklyn, certainly, because I spent 20 years of my life there, but I don't think of myself as a Brooklyn artist any more than I think of myself as a male artist. I will say that when people would respond to Squid with a kind of Brooklyn-centric reaction I was pleased with that, because obviously Brooklyn means a lot to me.

Cinematical: And what about Long Island, where this movie's set? Had you spent time there?

NB: Not really. We shot in Long Island, but [it's] never specified where [the movie] is. I think in some ways the emotional life I was bringing to the script when I started writing was more about leaving home, about being out of your comfort zone. Squid is about the comfort zone at home not being as comfortable as you maybe thought it would be; this was more, for me, about those feelings of leaving. I still am very connected to New York, and I never love leaving New York, so in a way, the sort of anxiety that seeps into this movie came from my feelings of, as a kid, leaving the comfort of home.

Cinematical: The character of Margot is fairly unsympathetic. Do you want audiences to hate her, love her, pity her or empathize with her?

NB: I want people to understand her. For me personally, if I understand somebody, I can feel for them. I don't have to like them, but I can feel for them. Knowing that she's in pain in a lot of ways doesn't let her off the hook, but at the same time I see why she's doing the things she's doing. And that's what I want people to be able to see and experience.

Cinematical: Watching the movie, I felt as though she was a different person when she was a child. What might have changed her? Or was she always like that?

NB: I think Margot, like a lot of the characters in the movie, is clinging to an idea of herself, or a sense of herself, because she's visiting her sister and she's in her old family home. It happens in my life, too. If I go home, I'm instantly caught back up in the feelings of that. I have a great relationship with my brother, but we can easily bicker like we were children again. But I think that happens to to adults all through their lives. They have these ideas of themselves as grown people, but they'll often start behaving childishly if they're in pain or if there's anxiety in the room. And so I think that's what's happening to Margot during the course of this movie, is that all these things are coming up, and it's reducing her in some ways to a more childish version of herself.

Cinematical: What is the situation with the sister Betty [who is alluded to but never seen]?

NB: The movie begins with a mom and son leaving on the train, but they're leaving the husband and father and other son -- we learn that as we go -- and I was interested in these subsets of families. You have family units, but then when people splinter out, [I was interested in] how they are without the others. And how their dynamic changes. With Margot and Claude, they almost become like a couple themselves, and Claude becomes the parent. Things shift. The same thing [happens] where you have siblings, when two of them are together and one is not there. It's a way to bond, to attack the other one, and it's a way also not to deal with their own issues. It's a movie of these people who are all not orphans, but they're re-creating the family bond, though not as the main family. Early on [Pauline and Margot] bond by laughing at the other sister, and then later, when Pauline turns on her, she starts using the other sister as an ally against Margot. I think that happens all the time with siblings.

Cinematical: In Squid in the Whale you write from the kids' point of view; and in this movie, you're also sort of on the kid's side. Is that something that you intend to keep doing? Do you feel more comfortable writing from the younger person's point of view?

NB: With Squid I think the way I got into the script was by writing the kids' stuff first, but that's just how it happened. With this one I really just had this image of the mom and kid on the train, and the kid was a character, so I started thinking about that ... I think both movies to different degrees are about kids and adults coexisting in the same place. In the movie there's a kids' table and an adults' table, but there isn't always a strict barrier, and this stuff is crossing over all the time. Squid maybe tilts more towards the kids, because by nature in a divorce you sort of go to the kids. In this movie, it's sort of everybody's movie. I like writing ensembles that don't seem like ensembles. Whoever's on screen at that time, it's their movie, and I feel like that should be honored. And it's a little different than the way people might be used to watching movies, where you want to kind of latch on [and say], "OK, this is my person," and everything's through their [eyes]. This might be more challenging to some people, but I like having it be everyone's movie. No one is spared, but I have empathy for everyone as well.

Cinematical: In Squid and the Whale and this movie, masturbation scenes play a big part. Is that just a coincidence, or is this a sort of theme for you?

NB: I think both movies are about intimacy, or lack of intimacy in some cases, but they're about intimate moments in people's lives. I'm interested in the way major events don't necessarily announce themselves as major events. They're often little things -- the drip, drip of life that changes people or affects people. So in a lot of cases the scenes that we're seeing are the in-between moments in people's lives. And I think masturbation is an intimate moment. It's people alone, it's people with themselves. I like people looking in mirrors, too. It's times you have with yourself -- observing yourself, playing with yourself, whatever it is. I'm articulating and intellectualizing it now for you, because you asked; on the other hand I wasn't thinking, "I've got to get a good masturbation scene in there."

[Pubrick]

I was interested in these subsets of families.
[I was interested in] how they are without the others. ,
I like writing ensembles that don't seem like ensembles.
I like having it be everyone's movie.
I'm interested in the way major events don't necessarily announce themselves as major events.
I like people looking in mirrors, too.

geez his interests are pretty vague until that last one. expect his next movie to be about a family living in a house of mirrors. and then a mirror breaks.

[modage]

Scenes From an Indie Marriage
How could Noah Baumbach and Jennifer Jason Leigh make such a biting, brutal movie? Pure love and togetherness, that's how.
Source: NYMag


Jennifer Jason Leigh met Noah Baumbach in 2001, she tells me. Leigh was living in the West Village at the time; she had a night off from the lead role in Proof, so she'd gone out alone to catch a show. The play was Neil LaBute's The Shape of Things, a tale of sexual gamesmanship among artists that might throw most ordinary folks off human relationships entirely.

Instead, Leigh ended up going to dinner with Baumbach and his friend Josh Hamilton, Leigh's co-star in Proof, who were also attending the LaBute play. Leigh and Baumbach began dating; they married in 2005. "The world feels free to ask about it," the actress tells me about the transition into marriage, as we eat at Les Deux Gamins, not far from the apartment the couple is renovating. "I mean, you signed the thing! You bought the house. But in a way, it's not that weird for me, because I do love it; this was always my childhood idea of what a marriage would be."

From accounts I'd read, I'd expected Leigh to be a lump of introversion: a null presence who flares only onscreen. Instead, she's intimidating, with gorgeous caramel streaks in her hair and big, movie-star sunglasses. But she relaxes as she describes her notion of connubial bliss. It's a familiar fantasy, one that animated Joan Didion's memoir of her life with John Gregory Dunne, an ideal I remember picking up like a virus in high school, when I read about Woody Allen's relationship with Mia Farrow, back in those sweet and innocent days, before the fall. There's another model, of course, in which love is poisoned by competition: Baumbach himself portrayed it with acid specificity in his memoir of his parents' Park Slope divorce, The Squid and the Whale. But Leigh and Baumbach are clearly aiming for something different from their parents' lives (she's the child of artists who split up as well): marriage as an idyllic, never-ending brainstorm among supportive equals.

On October 7, the New York Film Festival screens the couple's first truly shared project: Margot at the Wedding, starring Leigh, Nicole Kidman, and Jack Black. The scathing family tragicomedy is Baumbach's symbolic, though not literal, sophomore effort as a director and writer, and it features Leigh as Pauline, a hippieish mother "less grounded than she thinks she is," as Leigh puts it. Though both spouses are established artists—Baumbach the hot director, Leigh the indie chameleon—Margot at the Wedding is their debut film as a couple.

When it came time for filming, the duo made an agreement, one Baumbach jokingly calls "due diligence": If they had a conflict on set, they'd never let it show. As it turns out, the precaution was unnecessary, they say. By that point, Leigh says, "I was so excited to work with him as an actress. It was wonderful, just talking about scripts and film and all of that. When he's given me notes, they've always been good and specific. So I was excited to show off for him in a way—for him to see how easy I am to work with, what a pro I am, you know? I'm not a complain-y girl. I love the work, and I'm really serious, but I'm also easygoing. I couldn't wait for him to see that side of me."

Margot at the Wedding, in other words, is a brutal, near-LaButean vision of family dysfunction created, improbably enough, by two artists in the honeymoon phase of a happy domestic collaboration.

It's two days after the Toronto Film Festival: Leigh and Baumbach didn't see many movies, she tells me, or even attend the screening of their own film (they were too busy promoting it). We're at Letterpress, a stationery shop on Christopher Street, so Leigh can purchase thank-you notes she and Baumbach can share as a couple. But although the store is filled with eccentric designs she likes—she admires a black-and-white photo of a bride and groom—she can't decide what to buy. She'd like the cards to be small. She'd also like them to have envelopes. "This was not a good idea, with my personality," she moans, fretting over some tiny cards without envelopes. A pink-and-blue motif of glittery eggs is too girlie. "It's fine for me, but Noah's not sending this card. I'll tell you that right now. This would be more his thing," she says, picking up a card showing a sketch of a feral-looking owl escaping from a battered cage. "My mother would love this card, too. She has a great sense of humor; she loves Edward Gorey."

Leigh's mother is screenwriter Barbara Turner, who wrote Pollock. Her father is actor Vic Morrow, who died when she was 20 in a tragic accident on a film set. Her parents divorced when she was 2, and her mother remarried, to TV director Reza Badiyi. Leigh became famous for her role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, then later won raves playing sexually damaged waifs; when she aged out of waifhood, she offered up a fresh set of risky, stylized performances, building a mystique as a shape-shifter with a meticulous work ethic. At 45, she's worked with pretty much every major independent director, including the Coen brothers, Robert Altman, Mike Leigh, Todd Solondz, David Cronenberg, and Jane Campion.

And yet Leigh is not really a star. She's not a fashion icon; people routinely confuse her with other three-named actresses. Perhaps in response, over the last decade, she's begun stepping up as a quasi-autobiographical auteur. The 1995 drama Georgia was written by her mother, who based Sadie, Leigh's character—a fragile junkie with a successful sister—on Leigh's own sister Carrie Ann Morrow, who was a consultant on the film. In 2001, Leigh wrote, directed and starred in The Anniversary Party, a clever ensemble piece about an aging actress and her Hollywood circle, played by Leigh's own circle, including Kevin Kline and Phoebe Cates.

Baumbach has followed a similar path, diverging from early comedies toward the rawly confessional Squid and the Whale, which, like Georgia, used family misery as material, drawing an unsparing portrait of the ugly divorce between his parents, film critic Georgia Brown and novelist and professor Jonathan Baumbach. But when Baumbach and Leigh met, they were at different points in their careers. When I talk to Baumbach after his return from Toronto, he clarifies that Leigh's version of their own history is not quite right: Her tale of how they met is the "official story," he says, laughing. Although it's true they began dating after the LaBute play, they'd met for the first time four years before that, in the Toronto airport, at Customs. Back then, Leigh was riding high on raves for her performance in Washington Square, while Baumbach was literally lugging the film reels of his second film, Mr. Jealousy, which looked like it might not get distribution. "I went there with dreams of bidding wars; it was one of the more humiliating experiences of my career! So by the time I met her in 2001, she'd already seen me at my worst."

Several years later came The Squid and the Whale, which won him plaudits as the new Woody Allen. At the time, Baumbach talked about how the film was an emotional breakthrough, enabling him to be less ironic, more open to intuition. Did meeting Leigh play a role? I ask him.

No, that time line wasn't exactly right, he points out: When they met in 2001, he was already a few drafts into The Squid and the Whale, though the movie wouldn't be produced for three years. But maybe, he says, I should flip my suggestion around. "Because I was opening myself up in my work, I was opening as a person. Falling in love with Jennifer—somebody so accomplished and dynamic and in the same business—if I'd been with her a few years before, I might have been intimidated. But since I met her, she's been the single inspiration for me."

Margot at the Wedding is an intriguing composite of the couple's sensibilities. It features recognizable Baumbachian motifs: notably, a preteen boy with a wrecking-ball intellectual as a parent (this time, the mother). The milieu is set, as with The Squid and the Whale, among terrifyingly articulate East Coast literary types who wield insights as bludgeons. But the film also seems inflected by Leigh's interest in sisterhood, and her specialty at dramatizing the coping tools of damaged women, as in one sequence in which the estranged sisters played by Kidman and Leigh discuss their violent father, then turn to the plight of a third sister—"raped by the horse trainer!"—and the sisters burst into giggles, making it impossible for a viewer to tell whether they're joking, and if so, about what.

"It's funny, but in a really scathing, brutal way," Leigh says about the movie, which she praises for the way in which its cruelty rises out of real behavior, a character-centered sensibility she suggests has become a rarity. "Just to see people so exposed, and the undoing that happens, the destruction that ensues. It all could happen over the course of a breakfast. It's that way in families."

Leigh required none of her famously thorough research for this role, she told me; she'd been living these characters with Noah all year long. "I show Jennifer every draft," says Baumbach. "I'm working all day writing. It's not as if I'm writing a page and ripping it off and reading it to her—but it's a natural outgrowth of everything else we do." He wasn't specifically tailoring the role of Pauline for her, but early on, he knew Leigh could play the part, "although I'm not someone to do some big production, wrapping the script in a bow and handing it to her!"

In a sense, Margot at the Wedding could be taken as a B-side single to Georgia's sister act, only with Leigh playing the warmer, more stable of the duo, a kind of New Age Stella to Kidman's New England Blanche DuBois. It's a performance that softens the film's meanest sequences, capturing the way family members may long for an Eden of intimacy that never existed.

Much of Leigh's own personality, she acknowledges, was shaped in response to her older sister, a wild child who was the muse not only for Georgia but for her mother's earlier TV film Freedom, and who is currently a drug-addiction counselor in California.

"She was a very—" Leigh begins, then pauses, struggling to describe their childhood dynamic. "I mean, who knows why, exactly, because I could point to my parents' divorce, I don't know, I was 2 at the time, she was 5! But she had a very, very difficult time, and she was a very emotional kid. A lot of acting out. And so I was a very good kid."

Leigh remembers "literally going off to clean my room" when her sister freaked out. She can recall her own inner dialogue: "'I don't want to be that. I don't want that attention. That's scary.'" She laughs. "I want to act that!"

Voyeurs eager to find analogues to Baumbach's or Leigh's life are unlikely to find them, at least in any clear-cut way, in Margot and the Wedding. But the film does possess an intriguingly metafictional quality, an obsession with the repercussions of artists who cannibalize their families for material. It's a theme that not only resonates with Leigh and Baumbach's family-based films, but that also comes up in Leigh's The Anniversary Party, in which an actress's best friend accuses the actress's writer husband of cruelly caricaturing his wife. ("His image of you is a possessive, fragile neurotic!" "But I am a possessive, fragile neurotic!") In Margot at the Wedding, two of the most brutal showdowns revolve around a semiautobiographical New Yorker short story written by Margot—perhaps the first time one has been used as the proverbial gun in the first act.

"As artists, we have to answer to that all the time," says Leigh. She's referring to accusations of unkindness: the notion that using family experiences by definition crosses an ethical line. "Unless you're Philip Roth and you just don't give a fuck!" Still, taking such risks is a necessity for truly great art, she insists; it's at the heart of the most daring films. "You have to write in a personal manner for it to mean something—to be good, I think. Even if it's like the Coen brothers' stuff, where it's completely crazy, it's still personal in some way, or it wouldn't be brilliant. It's just how recognizable it is."

[w/o horse]

Showing at Northridge tonight but I can't go 'cause I have work.  My roommates are going, and I strongly urge all of SoCal to go.

[JG]

ugh, this is not good.  i really don't even know what to say, i just don't understand what baumbach was trying to do at all.   i haven't read any reviews yet, but p once again gets it rite without seeing the movie.  everything about this movie is so vague, there's just no general sense of what any scene is about, just a bunch of conversations about more or less the same thing.  i don't care if the characters are cold or cynical, that doesn't bother me, they're just, except for jennifer jason leigh, totally boring.  jack black is really bad, he messes up every scene where he's not suppose to be the comedic relief, and even the funny scenes aren't very funny.  then there's this bizarre subplot with the neighbors and once again i just have no idea what it is there for. 

jennifer jason leigh is super cute though. 

[Gamblour.]

I wouldn't say that this is not good, but a lot of it doesn't work very well. Then again, maybe it does, and it's just supposed to be so off-putting. I have to say, Margot is a very intriguing, well-written character, even if she is malicious and off her rocker. I love the way Baumbach writes people and a lot of his humor is visual, but not in a way you would think. There's a scene where Jack Black begins to tell a story, but everyone sort of trails off the screen, and once he realizes, moving to the background, he trails off audibly and visually. It was one of my favorite moments because it didn't call attention to itself.

I think the thing about Margot and how she always centers the world around herself, she's like so many people we all know. People who do things out of self-interest or just egocentrism, but Baumbach let's us see it and realize it. With people in real life, we don't always know it, and I think that's what's most off-putting.