Far from the painful experience that I envisioned, Margot at the Wedding is not a film that I would recommend, but it pretty much worked for me.
After writer/director Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale got me all hyped up (Wes Anderson production! Co-writer of The Life Aquatic! Great cast! Funny trailer!) and then fed me an overdose of unnecessarily uncomfortable preteen sexual moments, my shields were raised to maximum levels for his follow-up feature. But, as I did with the strong parts of Squid, I laughed a good bit at Margot's strong start. And then the laughs and engaging moments kept coming.
That's not to say there is a lack of the squeamish. An early scene during Margot's (Nicole Kidman) first night at her sister's (Jennifer Jason Leigh) house ranks right up with Frank's forays into beer and self-stimulation in Squid. Fortunately, that's as far as Baumbach ventures this time, though it seems that Malcolm's (Jack Black) breakdown is intended to elicit the same discomfort and raw emotion. Instead, Black, who should receive the bulk of the credit for driving the film with his winning sophomoric brand of humor, similarly makes these scenes tolerable for the very reason that he is incapable of delivering true cringe-worthy emotion. Instead, there is Black, ever much 1/2 of Tenacious D, doing his version of sorrow, and it's just the right balance of sketch comedy and actual pain to get us through unscathed.
However, Baumbach again leaves us with a stinker of an ending. Disney-esque conclusion is not a necessity for his films, but there is no need for a big (proportionately) finale intended to raise emotions to a climax after a string of subdued quirky moments. His friend Wes Anderson is able to close his pictures with perfectly suitable conclusions that indeed are conclusions, yet flow with the rest of the film and leave the characters ready for their next occurrence. Anderson understands the importance of a parting shot and has mastered it in his own brand of storytelling. So far, this crucial component has eluded Baumbach and it unfortunately is the reason why his films leave audiences with a slightly, if not entirely, negative feeling.
While Larry David mines the outright humor in the socially unacceptable on "Curb Your Enthusiasm," Baumbach seeks to likewise expose the unspeakable yet ultimately relevant nuances of humanity for good and for ill. His goal is not comedy (even though laughter is a major player) but realism, though it's the kind of realism that few of my acquaintances experience and is certainly not something that we would choose to film or watch. Perhaps that will be Baumbach's contribution to cinema when his body of work is more fully shaped: telling the truths about society that no one wants to hear, yet which may be the roots of our problems. With his 80-90 minute glimpses into the unlit regions of the soul, there is hope that, though presently painful and sometimes unwatchable, his films will be overall cathartic and healing.