‘Margot at the Wedding’ lacks a character to root for

In theaters

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, written and directed by Noah Baumbach, 93 minutes, rated R.

The driving force behind Noah Baumbach’s “Margot at the Wedding” is that Margot, played by Nicole Kidman in her yearly pitch for an Academy Award nomination, has come to the wedding of her sister, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), to cause trouble.

A lot of trouble. Margot is one sly little wrecking ball of devastation, and she’s not afraid to swing that ball as far and as wide as her mood swings will carry it.

In movies, of course, the trouble with trouble is that you can take it only so far before it starts to cause thematic trouble onscreen, particularly if nothing else in the movie – a character you come to care about, a story line you follow with interest – is there to balance the bad feelings.

“Margot at the Wedding” is a movie that feasts on bad feelings. It revels in them, it rolls in them, it splashes about in them until the screen becomes so thick with the murk of ill will, you’re either exhausted by it or bored with it by its midpoint.

The characters in this movie hate each other and love each other, but mostly they love to hate each other, and that gets to the sickness the movie courts. They’re quick to run a knife through any emotional wound they can find and then stab it again and again, until the whole screen is smeared with the blood of caustic dysfunction. Sound like fun? When Baumbach goes for dark humor, it can be, but since he often doesn’t, it isn’t.

Unlike Baumbach’s better movie, “The Squid and the Whale,” reviewed below, “Margot” doesn’t offer a single character who is easily championed. They’re all just unhappy types erupting along the sidelines, either caught in melodramas of their own making, or victims of those melodramas. One character, Margot’s son, Claude (Zane Pais), might have been somebody you could have rooted for if the story had cared about him, which it doesn’t, and if he weren’t presented as such a weird little misanthrope, which he is. Unfortunately, like all of the characters in this movie, he’s just another enigma.

The plot goes down like this: Margot and Claude travel by train to Pauline’s wedding. There, they meet her intended, Malcolm (Jack Black), a former rocker cum wannabe writer who doesn’t have the nerve or the talent to succeed at being either. Taking an immediate dislike to him, Margot sets out to destroy the wedding, which is complicated by Pauline’s secret pregnancy and by the bitterness each sister feels for the other.

Meanwhile, meaningless subplots brew – Pauline’s own crumbling marriage to Jim (John Turturro), her affair with wealthy Dick (Ciaran Hinds), and the cruelty she showers upon poor Claude, who is so dumbstruck by his mother’s pill-popping mood swings, he fails to register onscreen.

If “Margot at the Wedding” had come to the fore with something interesting to say about corrupt families and sibling rivalry, which is the movie it wants to be, we might have had something here – the performances certainly are good, particularly from Leigh, who is nice to see again onscreen. But since this is one of those quirky movies designed to deliver more quirks than reality, that’s not the case.

Grade: C

On DVD

THE SQUID AND THE WHALE, written and directed by Noah Baumbach, 80 minutes, rated R.

Noah Baumbach’s “The Squid and the Whale” is about a bickering New York couple married 17 years who decide to divorce. They are writers and they are academics – the worst sort of academics – inflated with ideas that are not their own, but which nevertheless inform their own empty rhetoric.

They may hail from Brooklyn’s Park Slope, but there still is the sense about Bernard (Jeff Daniels) and Joan (Laura Linney) that they exist in a subdivision of Stepford, where residents are programmed to drop as many literary references as possible in an effort to elevate the illusion of their own intellect.

These are people who exist in metaphor. Their lives are abstract. If they stood before a mirror, they’d see a host of better writers, critics and scholars staring back at them in disappointment. When Bernard and Joan have problems, they don’t try to work them through by digging deep into the issues at hand. Instead, they either point toward a bookshelf and mention an author’s name, usually Kafka’s, or they explode into a passive-aggressive rage.

With their own metamorphosis at hand, this sudden, unwanted passion unfolding in their lives is proving no good for their children – 16-year-old Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and his younger brother, Frank (Owen Kline). Caught in the middle, Walt and Frank are forced to watch their peculiar family dissolve, with Bernard and Joan making the pretentious mistake of treating each boy as their equal, and thus fully capable of understanding and accepting the complexities of what’s to come, which isn’t only cruel, but ridiculous.

In this war their parents wrought, the kids hold their own as long as they can. But since no divorce is without its ramifications, “Squid” follows suit to show just how devastating its effects can be. There is nothing new in that, so what sets the movie apart and makes it so satisfying is its stripping down of the indignant, out-of-touch, selfish, false academic, a satisfying approach that generates interest because of the egos on display, and because of the egos eventually bashed.

Grade: B+

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which appear Mondays, Fridays and weekends in Lifestyle as well as on bangordailynews.com. He may be reached at Christopher@week

inrewind.com.