Monday 3 March 2008

Margot at the Wedding (Noah Baumbach. 2007)


There have been some really fantabulous films released already this year but I think this has to be, for me, the cream of the crop so far. I would imagine that Baumbach's special brand of black and alien humour is not for everyone but it doesn't have the self-conscious clever-cleverness that seems to plague some American Indies. The themes of discontent and dysfunctional families are certainly not new (an obvious contemporary comparison being Wes Anderson, but one could go on), but Baumbach manages somehow to instill a sense of Bergmanesque solemnity into his films regardless of his warped and somewhat laughable characters - you're able to laugh because the situation is clearly not 'fixable' and it ends as quietly, neurotically and messily as it started. Yet, there is also a deep sense of underlying trauma, which the characters themselves have to laugh at in order to consolidate the tenuous hold they have on normality - a hold that continually threatens to disintegrate. I've never seen Nicole Kidman play such a loon before - a part which she pulls off extraordinarily well. Jennifer Jason Leigh, as always, I thought was marvelous and I didn't even mind Jack Black too much.

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