Noah Baumbach, 2007
Surprisingly, it would seem that after collaborating on Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou script, Noah Baumbach has walked away the better man. Or at least a better man.
Pre-Life Aquatic, Baumbach’s work consisted of a quasi-triptych of talky NY-esque comedies (including one he disowned) beginning with 1995’s promising and celebrated Kicking & Screaming, and concluding with two lesser films that some people liked, but no one loved. While working on a failed TV pilot and amassing funding for his next film, he worked on Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums follow-up, much to much surprise; the lack of Anderson’s regular co-writer Owen Wilson freaking y’all out and, subsequently, cited as the much-criticized film’s sorest spot.
The following year Baumbach released The Squid And The Whale - his first film in nearly ten years - and to say that it had been heavily influenced by his time with Anderson was an understatement, but that it was so much better than his previous output was the real surprise. A writerly tour de force, it had all of the dialogue of his early works but now sported both a milieu and a melancholy that, while short of outright plagiarised, was seemingly borrowed wholesale from Anderson’s works. An über-personal portrait of his own family’s wargames, it was no longer just talky but was now verbose, dense, and beautifully cinematic, and in the last two months we have had yet another chance to catch Baumbach’s newest effort side-by-Wes-Anderson-side.
Anderson’s Darjeeling Limited has not been well received. Shooting in India with a small crew in large crowds seemingly denied Anderson his trademarked compositional density and often wonderful sense of artifice, and resultingly led to the over-employment of his just-as-trademarked signatures (slow motion walking/running, British Invasion, etc). To call it a misfire is to ignore the achingly drawn relationships and the beginnings of an approach to “storytelling” that does not fit into a neat Wes-Anderson-mark’d box – not for nothing, Darjeeling features his first lengthy non-dialogue/non-montage sequence, the film’s most straightforwardly moving passage - but a more indicative example of the film’s relative merits is Darjeeling’s flashback scene: after seemingly avoiding it for most of its duration, it begins as the work’s most unsettling passage, the latecoming preamble to all that precedes it. But Anderson lets it run overlong as it moves towards ill-conceived farce, ultimately diluting much of the scene’s effect, and combined with the strange decision to halt proceedings in search of ”Mom” as it seemed to be perfectly concluding otherwise rendered a previously omnipotent Creator suddenly human, flawed. Baumbach, however, has emerged from his two recent films as one of the most pointed and scathing writers of interpersonal relationships in American cinema, and his new film is absolutely a continuation of this.
Just as “OK, me and mum versus you and dad” is Squid And The Whale’s bruising overture, Margot At The Wedding opens with a child mistaking a stranger for his mother; a potent image of familial disconnect that is almost cute compared to the narrative’s fleshed-out skirmishes. As author Margot - an icy mother and a borderline psychotic who bears twice the manipulative power of Squid’s Jeff Daniels but twice his intellect – Kidman (and I know this isn’t saying much, but I’m serious) is career fucking best, she apparently only a strong character-based script away from a dizzyingly complicated performance that is as compelling and affecting as it is repellent. However, it is in orchestrating Kidman’s teetering from disarmingly critical bully to needy and sensitive girl that Baumbach’s talents as director most assuredly compliment his writing: in moments of critical attack she is simultaneously a sympathetic family woman and often the child of her abusive father; Margot’s dialogue a parade of unsparing honesty dressed in barbs, of domineering passive-aggressive commands originating from her own near-manic self-defensiveness and neediness, and resulting in the ongoing estrangement of everyone in her life.
As an alleged tribute to Eric Rohmer’s 1970’s walk-and-talkers it succeeds in Harris Savides’ soft old lensing and Ann Roth’s paper-thin autumnal dresses, and who can blame the auters of today for looking back t’wards the sunny auteristic salad days of that most loved of filmic decades? It even redraws a final scene staple of classic cinema as a coda that neatly tentpoles with the aforementioned overture, and is again indicative of the quantum leap in craft that Baumbach is riding. If the film has a weak point, it is Jack Black’s first real straight dramatic role (the horseplay of 2005’s King Kong and his pre-High Fidelity/Tenacious D rent-payers notwithstanding), and it seems to be largely a casting concern: each of his scenes inviting audience chuckles for no reason, with his ‘Malcolm’ perhaps the film’s second-most fucked up; his role actually a wonderfully written wholly three-dimensional sub-plot/third-act-springboard, he seemingly existing primarily to bring Kidman and sister Jennifer Jason Leigh together/apart once again. In a lazier film this kind of filler passes for naught but narrative padding, but here it is a moving trajectory that both informs proceedings and shapes them, and in making Black’s scenes with fiancée Jason Leigh completely two-handed Baumbach completes a universe of familial ties that encircle Margot like a constant intervention, one that – much like Squid & The Whale - ultimately engenders the film’s moving final image, a single-note that provides the film’s sole resolution.
