If gut-wrenching emotional pain is comedy -- and it can be in the right circumstances -- then Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding is a laugh riot.
When it made its debut at the Toronto film festival in September, I asked viewers to imagine their most squirm-inducing and utterly mesmerizing family crisis ever. Then multiply the embarrassment factor by 10.
That is the brutal honesty that propels the Oscar-nominated Baumbach in his cinema. Margot at the Wedding is the Brooklyn-born filmmaker's follow-up to The Squid and the Whale, another film that lays the human psyche bare.
It is also what makes the new film so compelling, even when you want to turn away from the emotional train wreck on screen.
It helps, of course, as it did with The Squid and the Whale, that there are stunningly modulated, fearless performances that channel our darkest everyday insecurities.
Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh play two sisters locked in a vicious love-hate cycle that clearly stretches back to early childhood. They are now adults who rarely see one another.
But -- surprise, surprise! -- Kidman shows up at her sister's wedding weekend, a low-key affair to take place on the lawn of the sisters' original family home on Long Island. So it is too bad that Kidman instantly loathes the groom to be. He is played by Jack Black as an awkward, clumsy, self-absorbed loser who covers up with bluster.
In a film as cruel, funny and illuminating as this one, it turns out that Kidman is the worst offender. She is the most neurotic. She is the most pathetic. And she is the most selfish creature.
There are, of course, old sabres to rattle and fresh wounds to inflict and plenty of salt to rub into gaping sores in the psyche. It is impossible to overstate just how far the people here go in their verbal abuse of one another. And the presence of a child, no matter how young, makes no difference.
Margot at the Wedding is deliberately modelled after French director Eric Rohmer's Pauline a la Plage (Pauline at the Beach). At one point in its development, the American film was going to be titled Nicole at the Beach, but the casting of Kidman rendered that plan a little precious.
The new film is a lot meaner in spirit than Rohmer's classic opus. It is also more daring in its pacing, editing, structure and cinematography.
Among those elements, the visuals are the most arresting and satisfying. New York cinematographer Harris Savides, who also photographed Zodiac and American Gangster, used vintage lenses, as much available light as he could get away with and a hand-held camera, all to achieve a startling realism. So much so that, despite having so many recognizable actors on screen -- the support cast includes John Turturro and Ciaran Hinds -- you get buried in the sexually charged traumas on screen. You feel you are witnessing a real family, not an acted one.
That makes the pain they explore all the more shattering. And all the funnier because of the way Baumbach and co. present their characters.
(This film is rated 14-A)
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