Margot at the Wedding: A-

In Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, we aren’t just asked to be fascinated by Nicole Kidman’s emotional nakedness as the ugliest of emotional manipulators, but to be riveted by it. No small task, in theory. The titular character, Margot, is a towering persona; precariously pre-possessed but owner of a tongue sharp enough to cut diamonds, and an ego to match. She’s like Jeff Daniels, the lunatic-dragon from Baumbach’s last film The Squid and the Whale, meets statuesque beauty meets literary-genius pretension. As a character, it’s a hefty feat to pull off, and yet Kidman, stripped bare of most of the armaments most top-dollar movie stars demand these days, is pure unvarnished glory as a sister who comes, with her son (Zane Pais), to her estranged sister Pauline’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wedding to "support her," while really all she entends is a mess.

While there, what a mess she does create. For starters, she sets her sights on dressing down Pauline’s fiance Malcolm (Jack Black), an apathetic schlub who’s appealing by the sheer fact of his nuerotic-less agenda; in comparison to Margot’s kin, he’s downright sane. But problems she does find with him, and as a skilled short-story writer, Margot effectively manuevers in seeds of doubt about the courtship with as few lines (or rather, put-downs) as necesary. From there she succeeds in creating a mess of her own life, albeit more or less on her own terms. When she came to her sister’s wedding, she left behind her husband, but it wasn’t from sheer lack of interest (although, invariably with someone of her persona, that must occasionally arise). No, rather Margot has a lover, Dick (Ciaran Hinds), whom she’s quite interested in keeping...and passionately making love to. Thus, no husband. But things do get out, and in a family where the most common communication is a lacerating cocktail of accusations, withering observation, and passive-aggression, Margot inevitably must confront, in her own way, the price of her sleeping-around.

Both of these events, both of which are mostly strung-out for the majority of Wedding, propel what plot there is, but just as in Whale, far more of the attraction of the movie comes from the devastatingly intelligent manner in which Baumbach, as writer-director, probes the darkest crevices of relationships. The way in which he does so - both as a sparsely beautiful filmmaker (he turns the East Coast into a sprawling, decaying, weedy, and expansive forest-beach) and a writer of no small talents - innately challenges the viewer; the sting of his characters’ words strike the audience as much as the peoples of his fiction. Yet from that pain, he pulls no small amount of catharsis. And to create that pain, he whips up no small amount of great dialogue. In fact, on more than two or three occasions, there are conversations in Wedding that are so delightfully written you want to bottle them up for later. If ever there was a screenwriter who could turn speaking into an intricate rhythm of silence and sarcasm, it’s Baumbach, and his skillfully dry wit offsets the uncomfortable nature of his project.

And when I say uncomfortable, I mean it with a capital U. The camera crams in on the ugliness, the pain, and the dramatic confrontations when two very different people are thrown together for an extended period of time. But it isn’t just two incompatible people, our director is saying, it’s two sisters - and by their very definition, they love and hate in equal measure. This bedrock conceit is a tad difficult to swallow, but seeing as how it is central to such a beautifully wry portrait of characters simmering with nuerosis (rather than the far shallower, reverse philosophy), I’ll go along with it. And seeing as how this may just be Noah Baumbach’s most affecting film yet - and one that surely cements him among other great American writer-directors who specialize in the pitter-patter of talky psycho-drama (e.g. Richard Linklater, or more aptly: Woody Allen) - you may be inclined to take the journey as well. It’s a painful one, and it ends abruptly (if not as traumatically as Whale), but it is measured and observed in lovingly stringest doses that scald and delight in equal measure. Much as Pauline and Margot do each other.