Estranged days

>> Noah Baumbach on writing,
rationalization and his brutal new film
Margot at the Wedding

by MARK SLUTSKY

Noah Baumbach’s 2005 movie The Squid and the Whale was an intensely funny and stinging portrayal of a family unravelling during a divorce. His latest, though, Margot at the Wedding, makes that film seem like The Parent Trap. Nicole Kidman plays the Margot of the title, a successful writer who visits her estranged sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) on the eve of Pauline’s marriage to the sweet, frustrated slob Malcolm (Jack Black). Over several days in Long Island, frayed relationships, simmering resentments and countless frustrations bubble up into a miniature family apocalypse that’s more harsh than funny.

Baumbach spoke to the Mirror at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

Mirror: Margot is really intense—a really raw, intense, kind of harsh movie in a lot of ways. When you were writing it, did you feel like you were consciously going a little darker, a little deeper and rawer?

Noah Baumbach: It’s funny—and this is true of Squid also—I think that each time I sit down to write something, I assume it’s going to be a comedy. I don’t know if it’s a combination of what I’m finding funny these days or if it’s that once I give myself over to the material, it naturally takes me away from things that are necessarily funny. I think I try to adhere to a certain truthfulness, at least to the world I’ve created. Maybe it’s even the more you learn about people, what was funny in the first reel may not be that funny any more, even though it’s the same line.

M: Maybe it’s just because it’s Nicole Kidman playing her, but Margot seems sympathetic at the beginning of the film, but gets less and less so throughout the movie. Did you sort of intend it to be a journey away from the main character?

NB: In the beginning it wasn’t deliberate, because in the beginning I had this idea of a mom and son on a train, and I just started writing, so I didn’t know how all this was going to turn out. As I lived with it and re-wrote it, it did become clear to me. I guess I don’t think of her as becoming less sympathetic, but I think you’re coming into it from her point of view, so she’s talking about her sister and what a nut she is and she’s marrying this jerk, and so it’s natural if you start off in a movie that you’re going to believe the person. It’s something we all learn in high school English: we learn about the unreliable narrator, and this isn’t done in any deliberate way. It’s not The Usual Suspects’ unreliable narrator. It’s something a little different.

Defence mechanisms

M: In what way?

NB: Because then you’re meeting Pauline with these expectations that, as you live with her, you realize aren’t necessarily true. Pauline’s not crazy, but even the positive things Margot’s saying—they keep referring to each other as each other’s best friends—may not be true either. But it’s also about our expectations of people, and our expectations of ourselves, and I think what you kind of want to be true about the world, and stories you tell to keep yourself feeling good or more secure. In a lot of ways, this movie’s about how those defence mechanisms and rationalizations and things, when they start to be stripped away, or when reality tells you this is not the case any more, how difficult that is. And I think that does lead to what you’re saying, which is a rawer, tougher experience. But I also think that can be pleasurable, because we all live with those things, and why not go to a movie and see some of that torn down or exposed?

M: Margot has such a strong cast. Did you write the film with your actors in mind?

NB: I remain sort of wilfully naive as to who’s going to play the parts when I’m writing. When I’m writing, I have to believe these people are real, in some way. It’s almost like playing with dolls or something. The idea is that they exist somewhere. And maybe that’s more how novelists or short story writers or writers who aren’t ever going to cast the parts work. But at the same time, I know my mind is concurrently working at absorbing a feeling of the movie. So when I’m done with the script and I have to now cast it, I usually have an idea of an actor, even though it’s not someone I’ve been consciously writing for.

Because I live with Jennifer, I knew that Jennifer was going to play Pauline. Jennifer was an inspiration in many ways, throughout the whole script, but it wasn’t as direct as, “Oh I’m writing this part for Jennifer to play it.” I really tried to write characters that were true to themselves and that I really thought were interesting and then know later.

Margot at the Wedding
opens this Friday, Dec. 7

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