By Linda Winsh-Bolard
How to ruin and re-gain your wedding happiness.
It’s been years since Margot (Nicole Kidman) saw her sister Pauline. Now when Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) is getting married and Margot is about to leave her husband, Margot goes to visit her sister who lives in the house where they grew up together. She brings along her son Claude (Zane Pais).
The preparations are relatively relaxed, considering that Pauline is pregnant, but had not told anything to her groom Malcolm (Jack Black), or her older daughter Ingrid (Flora Cross). Malcolm is fat, coarse and income less (he is like the guys we rejected when we were 16, says Margot to Pauline). Margot has a talk about her latest novel, and had not told her son about the upcoming trouble home, nor her husband Jim (John Turturro) that the town is also a home to her former lover Dick (Ciaran Hinds) whose flirtatious and obnoxious daughter Maisy (Halley Feiffer) tempts both , Claude and Malcolm, and that the neighbors are nasty and weird.
And all that gets analyzed in dialogs, mostly between the sisters. Brutally open mouthed Margot lost all contact with Pauline after she had published a story that Pauline believes was based on her marriage, and helped to destroy that marriage. Margot, successful in her writing career, probably commits that sin as often as many other authors, and it not forgiven.
Pauline is a successful teacher; she does not lack carrier or family. The sharp competition between those two, is one between equals. Unfortunately, a large part of it is centered on sexuality, or rather female desirability to the opposite sex and it’s waning with time- and the possible trauma it causes. Male preoccupation with female sexual desire is as old and astonishing as the almost absolute lack of male understanding of it. I do have to fault the many female authors, who in one way or other, prop those pathetic images because their editors told them their work would not sell otherwise.
Among this neurotic family, old neurosis as well as new suspicions, it seems that Malcolm is nearly the only one oblivious enough not to have one, the success or lack of it would have play much better than aging. But that cannot be, because both women are successful, both have children and that, to the author, leaves just their sexuality to bicker about. Much of the biting takes place in front of the kids, which makes one wonder whether the Moms consider such behavior a good training for life or care so little for any privacy. One hopes the story is not based on personal experience.
The nice thing is that Jennifer Jason Leigh and Nicole Kidman are equally strong in their parts, each holding their own, and there is no overcoming star power in the film. The men, such as there are, the largest part if that of young Claude, are also equally competent actors, even if their parts greatly differ in characteristics. It is all about self absorption but it is very well delivered, the softness and doubts nicely mixed with the hard unforgiving desire for power.
Noah Baumbach uses relatively rarely applied technique of scene interruption. A dramatic action is developing when the director cuts into it interrupting the expected development with seemingly unrelated action. Into a certain degree it imitates real life (although how far is disputable, in my life nasty scenes are never interrupted by a nice, or even nasty, phone call) and to a certain degree it keeps the tension going. That is welcome because these are intimate, often familiar scenes among people who don’t care about truth and objectivity nearly as much as about personal loyalty (Just hear me and be on my side) and despite sharpness the digging is not all that new.
A Paramount Vantage release of a Scott Rudin production. Produced by Rudin. Co-producer, M. Blair Breard. Directed, written by Noah Baumbach, Camera: Harris Savides;
Margot - Nicole Kidman
Pauline - Jennifer Jason Leigh
Malcolm - Jack Black
Jim - John Turturro
Dick - Ciaran Hinds
Claude - Zane Pais
Ingrid - Flora Cross
Maisy - Halley Feiffer
