Dir. Noah Baumbach, US, 2007, 93 mins
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Black
Review by
Carol Allen
In his debut featureThe Squid and the Whale Baumbach was dealing with the break up of a marriage and its effect on the couple's two sons. Here he continues the theme of the effect of childhood experiences, in that the characters in this movie are - in theory at - least adults but still nursing and playing out their childhood hurts.
Margot (Kidman), a writer, goes home for the wedding of her sister Pauline (Jason Leigh) to Malcolm (Black), who dabbles is painting but doesn't actually do very much. The sisters have been estranged for years, so Margot's arrival is both a surprise and guarantees a bumpy ride for all. Because while Baumbach endeavours to present Margot as a complex character, she is in simple terms just an old fashioned, meddling bitch, who creates chaos wherever she goes. As the sisters gnaw on old family bones, Margot's rather girly son Claude (Zane Pais) forms a tentative friendship with Pauline's daughter, Ingrid (Flora Cross). Meanwhile Pauline's nasty neighbours drop rubbish over the fence and whinge about the tree in her backyard, which they want chopped down and Malcolm does his best to stay out of it all.
Both Jason Leigh and Kidman are fine actresses but the characters they play here are just irritating. Pauline is a needy, neurotic pain and not even Kidman can turn the bundle of diverse characteristics which is Margot into a convincing character, while the character's obsessive drinking and smoking is merely a lazy, overused cliché of contemporary American movieland to indicate neurosis or worse.
The best performance in the film is Black as Malcolm, a loser who's more interested in growing his moustache than in the scrapping going on around him. Black's becoming a rather fine actor and he's quietly funny and endearing in this. Ciaran Hinds as the fellow writer love rat, with whom Margot's having an affair, is also rather good. The scene, where he's interviewing her in the local bookshop about her latest opus while subversively attacking her about her life, is one of the few occasions when the film comes to life. There's also an effective cameo from John Turturro as the thoroughly nice husband, whom she's planning to leave.
While it is admittedly intermittently funny in its observation of dysfunctional family dynamics, the narrative meanders along in a series of not terribly well related incidents, many of which don't tell us anything useful and the characters' obsession with picking over childhood hurts and conflicts and wallowing in self pity about them is merely ridiculously self indulgent. One just wants to shake them all and tell them to get over it and grow up. Compared to The Squid and the Whale this is a distinct disappointment.
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