By Curt Schleier

A number of years ago, I reviewed a Stephen King horror novel and, as a joke, wondered where the child welfare people were when he needed them.  At the time, King was more reclusive than he is now, and little was known about his background.  Since then he’s become more accessible and I’ve read details about his apparently very difficult childhood.

I of course felt terrible.  It was a stab at humor that might just as easily become a stab at the heart.  It’s why I’m extra careful in discussing MARGOT AT THE WEDDING.  The screenwriter-director Noah Baumbach seems to have staked out and laid a substantial claim to dysfunctional families as subject matter.

His 2005 THE SQUID AND THE WHALE earned him an Oscar nomination for best screenplay, and numerous questions from journalists about how much of the movie was based on his real life.  In a recent story, the New York Times called SQUID a “film a clef,” pointing out that like the two main characters, his writer parents were divorced when he was a child.

If it turns out that MARGOT is another “film a clef,” I’ll feel terrible again about this review -- and really ticked off at his parents.

When the film begins Margot and her son Claude (Zane Pais) are on a train.  They’re traveling from their Manhattan home to a country house in Maine to attend Margot’s sister’s wedding. 

There is a telling moment right at the start when Claude, returning from the club car with sandwiches, inadvertently sits down with the wrong woman.  You can interpret that vignette a number of ways: he doesn’t know his own mother, he doesn’t (want to) remember where he sat.  But anyway you look at it, it’s not a good sign.


Margot (Nicole Kidman) is a successful short story writer; her husband, Jim, is also a writer, though it’s not clear what he writes or if he’s any good at it.  She plans to leave him, and it becomes clear at least one of the reasons for the journey is because Dirk (Ciaran Hinds), with whom she is having an affair, lives nearby.  

Margot and sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) have been estranged for years, though why they’ve feuded is unclear.  They certainly shared a troubled childhood involving an abusive father.  There is also a mother and strange sister we never meet.

Pauline does not appear to have a job.  Neither does her fiancé Malcolm (Jack Black) whose profession seems to be writing letters to the editor.  He explains his lack of ambition with a certain degree of logic:

“For me, expectation turns to disappointment, so I’d rather not try.”

But all that serves as an excuse for Margot to criticize her sister, her choice of husband and even at times her son.  She violates confidences and can’t even accept a gift with grace:  “It makes me sad to receive a present I already have.  It makes me feel like you don’t know me.”


MARGOT seems less a theatrical film that a National Geographic special.  This family is more like a pack of lions on the plains, waiting to pounce on anyone or anything that shows signs of weakness – though the lions aren’t purposely spiteful.

I vainly searched for someone to like, something to hold on to.  Some critics suggest you don’t have to like anyone in a film for it to be good.  I am not one of them.