"Margot at the Wedding" (2007) / review and/or viewer comments

Margot at the Wedding

MPAA Rating:

for sexual content and language

Moral Rating:

_____

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Moviemaking Quality:

_____

Primary Audience:

Adults

Genre:

Comedy, Drama

Length:

1 hr. 32 min.

Year of Release:

2007

USA Release:

November 16, 2007

Relevant Issues

Is formalized marriage becoming obsolete? Answer
Many people are convinced that traditional marriages don’t work and that this practice should be abandoned. What does the Bible say about marriage?

Couple in love. Photo copyrighted
What is true love and how do you know when you have found it? Answer

Learn how to make your love the best it can be. Discover biblical answers to questions about sex, marriage, sexual addictions, and more.

Featuring:	Zane Pais, Susan Blackwell, Nicole Kidman, Jack Black, Flora Cross, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Seth Barrish, Matthew Arkin, Michael Cullen, Enid Graham, Sophie Nyweide, Justin Roth, Ciarán Hinds, Halley Feiffer, Joanthan Scwartz, John Turturro, Lisa Emery, Michael Medeiros, Ashlie Atkinson
Director:	Noah Baumbach
Producer:	Blair Breard, Scott Rudin
Distributor:	Paramount Classics

“One family. Infinite degrees of separation.”

Producer’s Synopsis: “Margot Zeller (Nicole Kidman), a savagely bright, razor-tongued short-story writer who creates chaos wherever she goes, sets off on a surprise journey to the wedding of her estranged and free-spirited, unassuming sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh).

Margot, with her all-too-rapidly maturing son Claude (Zane Pais) in tow, arrives with the gale force of a hurricane. From the minute she meets Pauline's fiancé—the unemployed artist Malcolm (Jack Black)—Margot starts to plant seeds of doubt about the union. As the wedding approaches, one complication crashes into the next: vengeful neighbors, a beloved tree in the backyard and Margot's own marital turmoil.

The two sisters find themselves at the precipice of an unexpected transformation ultimately revealing that even when your family is about to implode… the one thing you can cling to for solace and comfort is your imploding family.”

Movie Critics

“…plumbs the inky depths of smart, shallow people… characters are garishly narcissistic from first frame to last.…”
—David Edelstein, New York Magazine

“…audacious, brilliantly performed dysfunctional tragicomedy…”
—Michael Rechtshaffen, The Hollywood Reporter

“…‘Margot at the Wedding’ is a circus of family neuroses and bad behavior that perhaps a therapist could make sense of better than Noah Baumbach can.… off-the-charts self-involvement of all the characters will stall crossover to wider auds.”
—Todd McCarthy, Variety

“…I've had root canals that were more enjoyable than ‘Margot at the Wedding’ …hugely pretentious, ugly and annoying…”
—Lou Lumenick, New York Post

“…Noah Baumbach should take a break from moviemaking and go to therapy… If the movie has one main idea, it’s that life’s tough and everyone sucks at it.…”
—Matt Pais, Chicago Tribune (Metromix)

See list of Relevant Issues—questions-and-answers.

Negative - For me, Margot at the Wedding was quite a boring movie. Though I understand that one must look deeper into the movie to actually see what it is about (in this case, conflict in families), to me the dialogue seemed unrealistic and the characters unlikeable. It didn't help that the movie also contained swearing, masturbation, and other things like that.
My Ratings: Moral rating: Offensive / Moviemaking quality: 3
—Sonya, age 18