Chowder heads

Nicole up a tree in Margot at the Wedding

Margot at the Wedding (2007) In the bonus material on this new DVD, writer-director Noah Baumbach (Kicking and Screaming; The Squid and the Whale) recalls his first meeting with Nicole Kidman. By his account, in a coffee shop neither of them ‘knew,’ he sheepishly nudged the script across the table to her when, we assume, she blushed, because both of them are so huggably insecure and childlike despite their mansions and millions. It had me thinking of the weird little game of peek-a-boo between Harry Dean Stanton and Diane Ladd in Wild at Heart…or the time Ralph Cramden howled to Alice, “I’m calling Bellevue ’cuz you’re nuts!”

    What was once quirky and chancy now feels tiresome and repetitious, and the camcorder vérité of Margot at the Wedding is 90 yawning minutes of shallow, angry narcissists trying to cope in a gray world where they’ve fallen from the center of attention. The title may be in the same ballpark as Eric Rohmer’s Pauline at the Beach (or Sally Cruikshank’s Quasi at the Quackadero), but similarities end there. Nicole plays a writer we’re to assume earns a decent living, though all the characters seem to be on permanent holiday with no visible means of support. She and her sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and son (Zane Pais) have volatile relationships; her sister’s fiancé (Jack Black) has volatile relationships except with a young girl we’re told he seduced, though this viewer doubts any young girl’s attraction to his sleazy bearing and portly physique. There are more kids, there are exes, there are strange neighbors. Zane has a kind of epileptic fit and falls into a swimming pool. It goes unexplained, of course, because life is so wearying, yadda yadda yadda…And Jack cuts down a tree…Is it over? Is it over? Please wake me when it’s over…