The film's set in the Hamptons, in an old family weekend house now inhabited by Margot's sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Pauline's getting married to a good-hearted loser named Malcolm (Jack Black, who else?), and she just wants to get through the weekend without being judged, found wanting, and executed. It's the pipe dream of anyone with a demon in the family.
Margot doesn't approve of Malcolm - how could she when everything about him offends her finely tuned aesthetic? She has arrived from New York in the latest stage of a perpetual crisis, fleeing the husband with whom she's bored and towing her 12-year-old son Claude (Zane Pais).
Claude is lank-haired and smart and just beginning to outgrow his worship of her. Their relationship parallels that of Jeff Daniels and Jesse Eisenberg in "Squid," but the psychology is maternal this time, softer and more dangerous. How do you survive a mother for whom everything is a well-phrased disappointment? "You used to be so gorgeous," Margot murmurs, running a hand through Claude's locks.
It takes a special sort of actress to play this character without audiences burning down the theater. Kidman performs a kind of magic act: She wholly inhabits Margot's monomania while allowing us the space to laugh and to cringe. Those pale blue eyes have rarely seemed less forgiving, more blind to those around her, yet she and Baumbach are merciful in keeping Margot life-size. All it takes is one observation from a cruelly macho writer (Ciaran Hinds) with whom she's flirting, and the lady's entire universe comes undone. As horrid as it is to be related to Margot, it's infinitely worse to be her.
"Margot at the Wedding" is a broader work than Baumbach's last movie, and it's funnier, too, even as you gasp at the misbehavior. Black walks a cautious line between his usual hambone act and something more attuned to character: Malcolm's a need-monster like Margot, but he isn't very good at it, and the failure renders him endearing.
