By Keith Uhlich
The best scene of writer/director Noah Baumbach's Margot at the Wedding occurs near its start, when estranged sisters Margot (Nicole Kidman) and Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh)—reunited in the latter's seaside home for her impromptu marriage to loser-with-a-capital-"L" Malcolm (Jack Black)—begin reminiscing about their unhappy childhood.
Pauline's deadpan revelation of an embarrassing incident from Malcolm's past ("Go ahead and use that information however you like," he says with thinly veiled sarcasm) inspires the sisters to run down the litany of sins committed against them by the various men in their lives. It all comes back, per Freud and Electra, to Daddy, and as the sisters move closer to the symbolic heart of the matter, the incitements get increasingly outrageous and disgusting, even as the monotonous confessional tone remains the same. By the time incest is breached and superseded, it's clear that Margot (a parasitic Manhattan author) and Pauline (a passive-aggressive exurban diva) have entered a purely fantastical headspace, incanting the most repulsive things they can think of as a means of catharsis. And then they laugh... uncontrollably and at length.
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To read the rest of the review at The Reeler, click here.
