An old man mumbled something to his old wife upon exiting the theater. This prompted the theater-door-holding, ticket-tearing, much younger usher/employee to ask the old man "You didn't like it?" His reply was "No, it was disgusting." I suspect many of the audience I watched the film with felt similarly. You could just tell, as soon as it ended with little resolution and in a very abrupt manner, that people weren't digging this movie.

I can't say that I blame any of the people who didn't enjoy Margot at the Wedding. I'm not even sure I enjoyed Margot at the Wedding. But for some reason I'm pretty sure I liked it. A lot. Which is strange because there is a whole, whole lot not to like here.

The old man wasn't wrong when he called it "Disgusting." The film is basically just that: a bunch of aging, mean people spending a few days saying mean things to each other. Jack Black's character is the most "likable", but that's mostly because we pity him, as every other scene is Kidman's titular Margot telling someone how terrible he is - he's too fat, he's too lazy, he's not good enough. If the odd scenes are Margot belittling Malcom, the even ones are pretty much all Margot belittling everyone else. Her husband, her sister(s), her mom and dad, her son, the next door neighbor and his daughter, the guy she's having an affair with. Pretty much every other character in the film gets torn apart by some Margot line or another. And it's like this over and over. Fighting and making fun and cursing and crying and rumors and all the other stuff aging, mean people do with their time. This is supposed to be a wedding, remember.

Visually the film is consistent with these ugly thematics. I originally complained about Once because the filmmakers seemed to use no artificial lighting to make the film attractive. Here, I think they used artificial lighting to make the film unattractive. It's just not pretty too look at.

And yet, no, it is both pretty to look at and comfortable to sit through. The title is a play on a wonderful Rohmer film Pauline at the Beach (Pauline is the name Jennifer Jason Leigh's character, the setting is a beach/lake front home). Whenever I watch that film I'm taken in not by the pretty people or look of the scenery (though both of them are prettier than in this film). Instead I love it because it's these people, coming to this beach town and doing whatever they want for a week or so. They wake up when they want and go to sleep when they want. They discuss love when and how they want, they experience love with whom they want. It's probably the most vacationesque film I've ever seen, because at every cut between every shot I can feel the freedom of these characters and this place and this time.

To a large degree, the structure of Margot at the Wedding is similar. Margot and her kid show up to the wedding and yes, nothing is really "pleasant", but it feels incredibly "safe". Like who cares if everyone's an asshole to everyone else? It's a group of family and friends at a house on a beach. They still eat dinner at night, and play croquet during the days. They're gonna have the wedding under this tent, and the bride and groom will both smile and it won't be a rainy day. In fact, you can pretty much see the weather, and it's the kind of weather I wanna live in: cold, crisp air, with foggy, dewy mornings (though this might very well be me projecting ideas into the film that aren't there...I'm not sure they ever mention the weather and I don't think you see snow or anything, so it could be summer for all I know). But it's the kind of place where this poster could exist, and that kind of place, for all it's nasty characters, is worth visiting.

The acting is fine. If you consider who these actors are outside of film, it's probably much better than fine. They're all completely believable and even the most outlandish things they do or say seem normal. Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh could be real sisters. They all wear their quirks and troubled pasts on their sleeves, but it doesnt come across as charicaturish or manipulative. I just accept that these people are real...this is a fucked up family, but it's still a family. And maybe that's what it comes down to. I went to a family reunion this summer, and I'm pretty sure a camera crew filming it all could have edited together a similarly "mean" portrait of all of us. Because families say stupid shit sometimes, I guess. It's very concentrated in this film, true, but maybe it's not so "disgusting" as it appears.

I don't know where I'm going with this, or if I've convinced anyone that it's worth watching (or even that I liked it as much as I think I do), so I'll stop here. If you get a chance to see it, I would probably not hesitate. If nothing else, it's one of the three most confusing/conflicting/unique filmgoing experiences of the year. (For some reason I feel compelled to group this film, along with Lars and the Real Girl and Interview into one little package of films that I'm not sure how much I loved, but which feel so "special" I wish they were my three favorite of the year.)

Was Claude really Pauline's son, or was that line in the library a slip?