Capital Celluloid 2019 - Day 328: Sun Nov 24

Margot at the Wedding (Baumbach, 2007): ICA Cinema, 12.30pm


To tie in with the release of Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story, the ICA presents a screening of the director’s 2007 film Margot at the Wedding on 35mm.

Chicago Reader review:
After his charmingly painful Kicking and Screaming(1995) and Mr. Jealousy (1998) and his more painfully autobiographical The Squid and the Whale(2005), writer-director Noah Baumbach announces “No more Mr. Nice Guy” in this hysterically hyperbolic and unpleasant if still witty dissection of family traumas. The neurotically judgmental title heroine (Nicole Kidman), a successful fiction writer, takes her son (Zane Pais) to the country to attend the wedding of her estranged, New Agey sister (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to a confused slacker she's recently met (Jack Black). Apart from John Turturro in a cameo, all the characters are monsters and/or basket cases (and the next-door neighbors are a nightmare projection of the family's class and ethnic fears). Though no family on earth is likely to be as dysfunctional as this one, realism is no longer Baumbach's register. It's almost as if Woody Allen had shifted his allegiance from Bergman to Strindberg while tripling his skill in handling actors.
Jonathan Rosenbaum

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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