Another giddy tale of intelligent people behaving like fools, MARGOT has obvious similarities to Noah Baumbach's previous scripts and directorial efforts, but stands as something of a departure nonetheless. Vastly more assured than KICKING AND SCREAMING, equally less comedic than THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, MARGOT is a mood dream of the sort Scandinavians used to crank out in quantity before European audiences started demanding AMELIE all the time. But real life plays out, in my experience, rather unlike a fairy tale, and there is a place in film for the grim fact as well as for the ameliorative platitude. Or there should be.
If this were a TV series, they might have called it "Nobody Likes Margot": she is self-centered, petulant, mopish. A cold sibling, a distant, disapproving parent, a fickle wife, she is easy to hate. But take a look at the people upon whom she vents her spleen: her idiot sister, with no apparent purpose but a strained smile, deserves a little slapping around. The sister's fiancé is a charmless, ineffectual, philandering lout. Margot's husband displays the charisma of a chartered accountant on Ritalin. And those neighbors she riles up really do suck; something should have been done about them long ago. Her son is the only innocent victim, and it's sad for him; but you know, it's sad for all of us. As Jennifer Jason Leigh has said, defending Nicole Kidman's character in interviews, we none of us had perfect parents. It is equally true to say that none of us is a perfect neighbor.
One of the nice messages of the savagely funny SQUID AND THE WHALE was that you can't blame other people for your problems, even if they're directly responsible. The sins of the father are not an excuse to lash out or screw up. This is is an important lesson in the age of first-world terrorism: the task is to heal, to fix, to solve, to get over it, not to wallow in the comforts of finger-pointing.
This sentiment exists in MARGOT too, but in a nebulous, more ambiguous manner. No doubt the sisters would seem more mature if they moved on from the postures they learned in childhood, but this story does not suggest that it would do them much good. There is no template for progress here. There is not much hope in this world, and that's okay; a statement is no less true for its lack of definable perspective.
The critical reaction has largely been to accuse the movie of misanthropy. We didn't hear so much of this about SQUID/WHALE because that occupied a definable American genre (family comedy), albeit the very harshest corner of the category; Americans will put up with any subversion of their values if they can be made to see that it's all in service of a dramatic purpose. But here the joke has no punch line, and its very ambiguity confuses and angers those who need things spelled out. I suspect that because MARGOT rarely makes us laugh, more often wringing out a sigh of pained recognition, many people are having a hard time with it.
If this were a TV series, they might have called it "Nobody Likes Margot": she is self-centered, petulant, mopish. A cold sibling, a distant, disapproving parent, a fickle wife, she is easy to hate. But take a look at the people upon whom she vents her spleen: her idiot sister, with no apparent purpose but a strained smile, deserves a little slapping around. The sister's fiancé is a charmless, ineffectual, philandering lout. Margot's husband displays the charisma of a chartered accountant on Ritalin. And those neighbors she riles up really do suck; something should have been done about them long ago. Her son is the only innocent victim, and it's sad for him; but you know, it's sad for all of us. As Jennifer Jason Leigh has said, defending Nicole Kidman's character in interviews, we none of us had perfect parents. It is equally true to say that none of us is a perfect neighbor.
One of the nice messages of the savagely funny SQUID AND THE WHALE was that you can't blame other people for your problems, even if they're directly responsible. The sins of the father are not an excuse to lash out or screw up. This is is an important lesson in the age of first-world terrorism: the task is to heal, to fix, to solve, to get over it, not to wallow in the comforts of finger-pointing.
This sentiment exists in MARGOT too, but in a nebulous, more ambiguous manner. No doubt the sisters would seem more mature if they moved on from the postures they learned in childhood, but this story does not suggest that it would do them much good. There is no template for progress here. There is not much hope in this world, and that's okay; a statement is no less true for its lack of definable perspective.
The critical reaction has largely been to accuse the movie of misanthropy. We didn't hear so much of this about SQUID/WHALE because that occupied a definable American genre (family comedy), albeit the very harshest corner of the category; Americans will put up with any subversion of their values if they can be made to see that it's all in service of a dramatic purpose. But here the joke has no punch line, and its very ambiguity confuses and angers those who need things spelled out. I suspect that because MARGOT rarely makes us laugh, more often wringing out a sigh of pained recognition, many people are having a hard time with it.