Lack Of Wedded Bliss Poses A Knotty Problem (from This Is Local London)

Star rating: **

Margot at the Wedding (15):
Dir: Noah Baumbach
With: Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Black

Watch the trailer here

How accustomed we've grown to Nicole Kidman's face. Taking the Australian-made thriller Dead Calm as her breakthrough, she has been at the top of the movie game for 20 years. Quite an achievement when the career expectancy of the average actress ranks behind that of a bacon-wrapped lion tamer.

As is to be expected, those two decades have brought their share of hits and misses for Ms Kidman. For every To Die For and The Hours there has been an ill-advised Bewitched or a dull and terminally unfunny Stepford Wives.

Margot at the Wedding finds Kidman landing somewhere in the indifferent middle, the place no actress of her calibre wants to inhabit. While far from a disaster, it's a movie that sternly resists embrace. The responsibility for that lies not with Kidman but with the sombre material handed to her by writer-director Noah Baumbach.

Having wryly dissected a divorce in 2005's The Squid and the Whale, Baumbach attempts to wring the same dark laughs from the other side of the marriage equation. Kidman plays Margot, an uptight writer from New York who travels to New England with her son for the wedding of her sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh). As we tune into the mother-son conversation on the train it becomes clear that Margot is not going to be the one leading the toast to the bride and groom. "I don't hold out a lot of hope for the whole thing," she sniffs. And that's before she has even met her brother-in-law to be, Malcolm.

Margot is the oil to Malcolm's water, the blue touch paper that lights his feelings of inadequacy. While she drifts from one book signing to another and her work graces the pages of the glossiest magazines, Malcolm labours endlessly over letters to the local rag.

There's more to their mutual loathing than artistic differences. Margot takes a palpable dislike to Malcolm's slovenly attitude and appearance, his very presence in her normally well-ordered world appearing almost too much to bear.

There must have been, oh, about two seconds between Baumbach creating the character of Malcolm and Jack Black being cast in the part. This is the School of Rock and Nacho Libre star as we've seen him many times before: manic, distracted, with a softer comic side to take the edge off any aggression.

Kidman, playing a writer for the second time after her stint in The Hours, is eerily convincing as the buttoned-up Margot. Best of all, she doesn't have to don a false nose this time. Bye-bye Virginia Woolf, tea dresses, and a hooter to put Pinocchio's in the shade; hello natural make-up and clothes apparently selected from Barneys casualwear collection.

Though Kidman takes star billing, she shares most of the screen time with Jennifer Jason Leigh (director Baumbach's wife). Leigh, whose finest cinematic hour remains Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle, portrays in some ways the most interesting of the siblings.

Both are stereotypes - Margot the waspish New Yorker versus Pauline the hippy-dippy chick who has dabbled unwisely in cults and unsuitable men - but Baumbach gives each character just enough edge to keep us intrigued. We might assume that there is little more to Pauline than long hair and a collection of self-help books, but the many layered script, and Leigh's subtle performance, hints at more.

The key relationship in the film is not that of Malcolm and Pauline but the one between the sisters. Baumbach captures expertly that blend of primal love and simmering tension that settles over most sibling relationships. Pauline and Margot know each other as well as any two people who have spent their formative years together could. They cannot escape their shared past. It's the present, where there is always the option to walk away, that causes so much friction.

As the sisters swing between reminiscing and bickering about their choice of men, the children get to know each other and Malcolm continues to fret. Adding to the general air of pre-wedding jitters is a dispute with the neighbours over a tree. All of this should be ideal fare for an amusing drama, darkly comic or otherwise. Other people's pre-wedding misery, after all, can be the cause of much joyous celebration. Not in this film, though. Aside from a lovely gag early on involving Kidman's impressive tree-climbing skills, there's little to prompt a smile.

Combining serious drama with comedy is notoriously difficult. Baumbach found a way in The Squid and the Whale, but Margot at the Wedding struggles before giving up entirely. Taking its cue from the lead character, it's not unattractive, but the sour tone and self-absorbed air make it a movie that's hard to like.

Margot's grim mood gradually settles over everyone and everything, so that by the end we are like guests at a wedding reception that has run too far past midnight, longing only for the lights to go up so we can get a fast cab home.

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