Margot At The Wedding review

Noah Baumbach created something of an indie sensation with his first film, The Squid and the Whale, a deliciously black comedy about the break-up of a family, and expectations were inevitably high for his follow-up. Fans are likely to be disappointed however: this is a bleak, misanthropic film which offers little to enjoy.

The writer/director has taken his lead from the French auteur Eric Rohmer, specifically his 1983 black comedy Pauline at the Beach in which a young girl comes of age while on holiday with her aunt. But while Rohmer's film is full of delicious observations and irony, Baumbach's work appears to be merely quirky for the sake of it, full of nonsensical and apparently meaningless actions.

Nicole Kidman is the titular Margot who, along with her teenage son visits her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) in her seaside home. Pauline is due to marry her oddball boyfriend (Jack Black), but Margot is puzzled by her sister's choice of groom who in her words, 'is like one of the guys we rejected when we were sixteen'.

Baumbach fills his story with little incidents that don't add up to very much and the film soon drags despite its relatively short running time. In the middle of all this, Margot's son Claude is presumably meant to be learning some life lessons about the adult world, but it's hard to see exactly what these are.

These are unlikeable, self-absorbed characters. Don't be taken in by the advertising which suggests this is a quirky, comedic independent offering. Far from it, for if anything, this is one of the feelbad films of the year.

Paul Hurley