netflix blogging: margot at the wedding

Last night JM and I watched Margot at the Wedding, the Noah Baumbach film from last year. I loved The Squid and the Whale and so was already ready already to like this. And it didn't disappoint me (though JM tells me the critics weren't fans). First off, the casting was terrific. How unexpected to see, in the same film, John Turturro, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Nicole Kidman, and (pictured above) Jack Black, who for the first part of the movie sports a mustache that, as his character Malcolm puts it, "is supposed to be funny."

And it is. Also funny is the Garfield mug (pictured above at Black's elbow) which shows up in one key scene when Malcolm turns into a sappy, blubbering mess on the phone to his fiance (JJL). Baumbach has a way of making things into near characters, and the mug, along with a giant tree in the backyard, both work in this way. The difference though is that the tree is far more central to the plot, but not nearly as funny (to me at least).

Anyway, Kidman plays Margot, sister of Pauline, played by Leigh. They work quite well together--both are kind of pillish, slightly self-obsessed, brutally other-critical, and, well, pretty fucked up. The kid who plays Claude has a lovely face and even lovelier crazy hair. And while it's certainly not a comedy, it gets wincily funny at times, and almost always, those times involve Malcolm. Whether he is talking about serious shit with his gut hanging over the band of his underpants or wielding a chainsaw while confessing transgressions to Pauline on the day of their wedding, Malcolm is in fact the star, from the moment he zooms up in his beat up ride to retrieve Margot and Claude at the train station. His zany neuroses outstage Kidman's lovely lines, Leigh's paranoid but truthful zingers, and Claude's awesome hair. And with his insistence that brilliance and fame are in fact a zero sum game, his resulting unwillingness to be around successful people, and his deep unhappiness wrapped with a thick coat of cynicism, I swear I know him from somewhere. Probably graduate school.