thoughts on "Margot at the Wedding".
I just watched "Margot at the Wedding" and I'm not quite sure what to make of it.
The characters are all very interesting and odd. The narrative is propelled by them. The acting is believable and the narrative seems incredibly real and true to life, until about the last third of the movie.
While I like art to reflect life to some extent, I also look for it to give me something beyond a representation. I expected more out of the film than I got. That is, all kinds of things happen in the first two-thirds of the film that seem to have a lot of promise, but, the film ends almost abruptly, with a whole mess of events culminating into something that makes very little sense. Why does the neighbor boy attack the children? That seemed really irrelevant, especially because it was never followed through, really. And, some little things made no sense. For instance, why would Margot throw her sweater and purse on the ground before chasing the bus? What will happen to her things? Maybe she wants her identity to have to be replaced, but it seems really unsatisfying to watch this ending because the action seemed so over the top, like it was calling attention to itself at the end. Why do they run away from the rest of the family the way they do, specifically from Becky and the mother? These seems to be no real apparent motivation for this in the film, in a film that seems otherwise solid in terms of demonstrating action that is motivated by character.
While some interactions are almost unbearably well done, such as the way Margot picks on her son Claude, or the way Claude and Ingrid seem to be bonding through a weird attraction to each other that they have to deny, or the constant competitive arguments between Margot and Pauline, others are empty. Why are the neighbors so weird and what do they contribute to the story -- except facilitating the tree-cutting situation? I can see the that Margot and Pauline's family have a massive streak of cowardice running through their personalities and that it makes them very afraid of the difference between themselves and their neighbors, but it seems so ridiculous. Pauline is willing to join a cult in which she is asked to drink the bathwater of the leader, she's got nude and naughty photos of herself and her boyfriend lying around the room, and yet she's both repulsed and terrified of the neighbors for being a bit savage? Maybe the point of the neighbors is to demonstrate how both families are savage in different ways. I don't know. The mother and other sister (Becky, a sister who as an adult still sleeps with her own mother?) show up and seem so peripheral to the lives of these two sisters that I really wonder about them. I didn't exactly believe the way that dynamic was presented. What was the point of this bit? I would have liked to see something more of a resolution in the last part of the movie, of...well, anything.
The sometimes-mustachioed Malcolm seems really interesting to me and also really ridiculous. And, more often than not, it seemed like no one took him seriously. He didn't even take himself seriously, despite some possibly very real talents. He went to Stuyvesant. He's wearing what looks like a Yaddo tanktop with not-so-white tightie whities as he's eating the wedding cake beside the collapsed tent. He paints and writes. However, he seems to be willing to confront issues only up to a point.
In fact, the whole movie seemed willing to confront issues only up to a point (maybe that was the point?), leaving responsibility for making sense of the events up to the audience. I might think this was fair if I didn't feel so annoyed by the way the last third of the movie just sort of built up into an unprovocated frenzy. I would have liked to see what happened next in the sequence of events. While we begin with Margot and Claude on a train and end with Margot and Claude on a bus, we sort of escape the experience of their journey altogether by abandoning any revisitation of it at the end.
I didn't dislike the movie, though the last third of the film was disappointing in comparison to the rest. Perhaps watching it again might make me like it more. But, I couldn't help feeling that I would have liked it far better as a short story than I did as a movie.
The characters are all very interesting and odd. The narrative is propelled by them. The acting is believable and the narrative seems incredibly real and true to life, until about the last third of the movie.
While I like art to reflect life to some extent, I also look for it to give me something beyond a representation. I expected more out of the film than I got. That is, all kinds of things happen in the first two-thirds of the film that seem to have a lot of promise, but, the film ends almost abruptly, with a whole mess of events culminating into something that makes very little sense. Why does the neighbor boy attack the children? That seemed really irrelevant, especially because it was never followed through, really. And, some little things made no sense. For instance, why would Margot throw her sweater and purse on the ground before chasing the bus? What will happen to her things? Maybe she wants her identity to have to be replaced, but it seems really unsatisfying to watch this ending because the action seemed so over the top, like it was calling attention to itself at the end. Why do they run away from the rest of the family the way they do, specifically from Becky and the mother? These seems to be no real apparent motivation for this in the film, in a film that seems otherwise solid in terms of demonstrating action that is motivated by character.
While some interactions are almost unbearably well done, such as the way Margot picks on her son Claude, or the way Claude and Ingrid seem to be bonding through a weird attraction to each other that they have to deny, or the constant competitive arguments between Margot and Pauline, others are empty. Why are the neighbors so weird and what do they contribute to the story -- except facilitating the tree-cutting situation? I can see the that Margot and Pauline's family have a massive streak of cowardice running through their personalities and that it makes them very afraid of the difference between themselves and their neighbors, but it seems so ridiculous. Pauline is willing to join a cult in which she is asked to drink the bathwater of the leader, she's got nude and naughty photos of herself and her boyfriend lying around the room, and yet she's both repulsed and terrified of the neighbors for being a bit savage? Maybe the point of the neighbors is to demonstrate how both families are savage in different ways. I don't know. The mother and other sister (Becky, a sister who as an adult still sleeps with her own mother?) show up and seem so peripheral to the lives of these two sisters that I really wonder about them. I didn't exactly believe the way that dynamic was presented. What was the point of this bit? I would have liked to see something more of a resolution in the last part of the movie, of...well, anything.
The sometimes-mustachioed Malcolm seems really interesting to me and also really ridiculous. And, more often than not, it seemed like no one took him seriously. He didn't even take himself seriously, despite some possibly very real talents. He went to Stuyvesant. He's wearing what looks like a Yaddo tanktop with not-so-white tightie whities as he's eating the wedding cake beside the collapsed tent. He paints and writes. However, he seems to be willing to confront issues only up to a point.
In fact, the whole movie seemed willing to confront issues only up to a point (maybe that was the point?), leaving responsibility for making sense of the events up to the audience. I might think this was fair if I didn't feel so annoyed by the way the last third of the movie just sort of built up into an unprovocated frenzy. I would have liked to see what happened next in the sequence of events. While we begin with Margot and Claude on a train and end with Margot and Claude on a bus, we sort of escape the experience of their journey altogether by abandoning any revisitation of it at the end.
I didn't dislike the movie, though the last third of the film was disappointing in comparison to the rest. Perhaps watching it again might make me like it more. But, I couldn't help feeling that I would have liked it far better as a short story than I did as a movie.