CINEMA: Margot at the Wedding

Although it would have been hard for director Noah Baumbach to follow up The Squid And The Whale with a film as successful, he makes a good fist of it here with a movie that is the emotional equivalent of bad feng shui.

Margot at the Wedding is one long howl of psychic pain and contains some of the least likeable characters you will ever see on the big screen. That includes Margot (Nicole Kidman) a writer who believes in honesty above all else. When her estranged sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) invites Margot and her son Claude (Zane Pais) back to the former family home for her wedding to artist Malcolm (Jack Black), Margot is not about to act all sweetness and light; she’s going to tell it exactly the way she sees it. Her honesty is not so much refreshing as downright gobsmackingly rude and the interactions between the characters are, at times, so awkward and painful you will want to avert your eyes.

It’s a bizarre, weird and rather experimental piece of film-making that doesn’t always achieve what it is striving for, but the acting is uniformly good, in the love/hate relationship between the sisters especially. Where it falls down is a lack of explanation or back story into what makes these people so dysfunctional, and though you can piece together some of their background, more exposition would have helped enormously. Dee Pilgrim