Finally got around to seeing MARGOT AT THE WEDDING last night. FOUR STARS! Sorry, but if you're a critic who badmouthed this movie, you need to find a new line of work. I'm gonna jot your name down from its grandfathered position on Rotten Tomatoes, and follow you around shouting that you're a communist... until the restraining orders arrive.
Too harsh? I don't know. Maybe it's that some of these critics, and I wont name names, are just frustrated fiction writers and they're mad at Baumbach's insider view of the fiction writer world. Honeys, would it help to know that most fiction writers are really just frustrated critics? Nicole Kidman's character, Margot, is a semi-famous writer of the New England snob variety, and a total bitch, but a believable one... a true one. And if as a critic you think a movie must be bad if all the characters are unlikeable...well, would you pan OTHELLO for the same reason?
I don't like OTHELLO either. Man, what a downer of a play... it makes my insides hurt. But I think the problem people have with MARGOT really boils down to their fear of bad parenting (Margot is running from a marriage to a steady-keeled dullard played by John Turturro--hell, I'd run too--and is turning their son into a Norman Bates). These hater critics must either be scared they are bad parents or are afraid they had bad parents themselves and, either way, they don't want to go to therapy to find out.
Bottom line #1: this is cinema, not life! You don't have to agree with characters to enjoy them. Free yourself of morality's leaden albatross. Baumbach is, if nothing else, a bona fide American new waver. With his heavy use of jump cuts and close-ups you can feel echoes of Argentine director Lucretia Martel (THE HOLY GIRL, LA CIENEGA) and right there, you got art, mister.
What you haters also need to know: bad apple hotties like Kidman's character really do create shit storms wherever they go. Cars crash, neighbors go rabid, idiots in diapers played by Jack Black cut down trees. I've seen it! None of that stuff is exaggerated.
Bottom line #2: If you don't like cinema only escapism, If you're just another sheep who gets angry when your pre-chewed audio-visual cud turns rancid and causes you to wretch instead of going all glazed-eyed into warm fantasy oblivion, then you are not a writer, you are a knee-jerk reactionary. For if you were to vomit that rancid cud up with love and lack of judgment you would in fact be a sheep no more, but expelled from the belly of the whale, shot from your amniotic matrix and into the cold light of real world of the true cinema lover, the cinema of Nicholas Ray, Hawks, Godard, Truffaut, Welles, and Martel! This is the cinema that is epicac, cinema as syrup of squill, not the cinema that is escapist feel good TRIPE!
Thursday, March 13, 2008
If you don't like MARGOT AT THE WEDDING, I'll get you... in your sleep!
Posted by
Erich Kuersten
at
8:56 AM
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4 comments:
I agree with you, Erich. I just rented this last week and I was shocked, based on some of the reviews I had read, how well written this movie was. I can't think of many movies last year that were better written than Margot, and Nicole Kidman is motherfucking fearless. Looking back, I think Armond White's vulgar review of the film is the one that most stands out the most as being completely out of touch. If this movie was written by a Frenchman he would've been creaming in his dashiki.
Good point about the French angle. Also if this was coming from Mike Leigh or Ken Loach they'd be creaming in their... whatever.
Great write-up, Erich, and on a very worthy subject. I loved Margot too and have been surprised and puzzled at how negative some of the reactions have been. It's a pleasure to see such a strong script, and anonymous is right, Kidman is friggin' brilliant in her role. This is obviously intensely personal material (like Squid and the Whale) and it gains so much from the director's unflinching attitude in plumbing some pretty grim depths of family and interpersonal relationships. I hope he keeps mining this difficult territory for awhile.
Quotes
Pauline: What's up?
Malcolm: I don't wanna do this.
Pauline: Come on, don't be that way.
Malcolm: No, I'm not being that way. I just don't feel like it. I'm gonna go back and... I have work to do.
Pauline: Dick doesn't care that you don't make any money.
Malcolm: Is that what you - that's not why. I just hate swimming. I really hate it. It's disgusting to me. My mistake was saying I'd do it to begin with. You have fun.
Pauline: Fine. We'll have fun.
Malcolm: People always pee in the pool.
Pauline: I don't think Dick and Maisy pee in their pool.
Malcolm: I'll bet you 500 dollars there's pee in that pool!
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