They say you can write a comedy about anything. It's a premise Woody Allen has been playing with in these later years: take a situation, any situation... It's funny or tragic depending on which elements you zoom in on and where it ends. Fade out on the kiss at the altar, it's a comedy; come back sixteen years later, maybe not. Allen explored tragic/comic perspective in the double-sided Melinda and Melinda then in the dyptych pictures Match Point and Scoop, which take a basic situation and examine it from opposing angles for opposing effects. The serious Match Point was a laudable success, and Scoop was to be its comedic flipside (except, as Sam says in "West Wing", someone forgot to bring the funny). No matter: point is, there's a theory that you could make a comedy about the Apocalypse work if you set your mind to it, and I guess Tamara Jenkins had that in mind when she wrote the Savages.
This one is about your old dad who treated you like hell then abandoned you, who's getting to an age at which he writes on the wall with his own crap, so he gets dumped on you to care for in his helpless dotage. It is a comedy in a classical sense, as the ending is redemptive, and those who emerge are fuller-souled humans than when they went in. In the broader sense, for those who might be harboring wacky expectations that a comedy be actually funny, this is not your blue-eyed boy. There are a few funny things in it, mostly inspired by Laura Linney's wonderfully expressive face, and, in fact, only about as many as you'd expect to find in a family drama. That is not to say it is not worth seeing. There's the acting, for starters: Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Philip Bosco in a moving turn as the fading and reluctant patriarch. Also, the characters are bold and unapologetic in their selfish and craven weaknesses, and that is refreshing.
Still, Margot at the Wedding is the one that roused my enthusiasm, doing Savages one better in the acerbic family business. Plus, it's funny.
I feel some guilt about reviewing Margot after a single sitting. I get a sense that there's more in it than I saw, and that repeated viewings are in order, which may always be the case with Noah Baumbach's films and those of his compadre Wes Anderson (with whom he cowrote the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, and with whom he shares both unconventional takes on family life and a certain deadpan sensibility).
There's nothing light-hearted about this entertainment, and nothing cowardly, either. Baumbach never worries about what we'll think, or whether we'll follow; he just tells his dark truths from such an angle that they come up funny. Sometimes we make the leap with him, sometimes we get lost in the ambiguity of the extreme chiaroscuros making up his people. Still, in those rare moments when I can't follow one of his emotional choices or interactions, it feels like my own shortcoming, not his,--as if he's looked harder at life than I have and so the problem is in my lack of the proper reference point.
To make up for having seen it only once, I went back and re-watched Kicking and Screaming, Baumbach's debut, a very dry, very finely-shaped and frequently hilarious story about four young men flummoxed at the prospect of making the leap from college into the real world. Juno WISHES she was this funny. It's quick and smart without being precious, and it avoids that infamous Juno-pitfall in which everyone in the world talks the same clever-speak by pointing up that these four have spent entirely too much time together all through their formative years (more than once a girl will say, "You guys all talk the same," generally followed by a mortified silence). It's a great debut with a great young cast. Whatever happened to Chris Eigeman? He was the master of this kind of humor, here and in the Whit Stillman trilogy (Metropolitan, Barcelona, Last Days of Disco). He's got some classics in this one: ALL his exchanges with Carlos Jacott, first off, plus there's the unforgettable bowhunter bit. Of all Baumbach's films, this one is the warmest, I think, the most heart-centered, for all its biting wit.
In Margot, the characters are more introspective and don't always talk about what's going on. Nicole Kidman's Margot (a writer), particularly, seems to mistrust language. All sides of family-hood come under the microscope in this one: coupling and uncoupling, child-rearing, sibling rivalries. Secrets are its major focus: the keeping or telling of them, the use of confidences as currency in the power-struggles of a tight family unit. One of the things Baumbach does well that gives his characters some of their 3-D feel is to let them reference inside jokes and secret history without explaining them to us. Margot's husband (John Turturro) and son (Zane Pais) laugh over a one-armed man with two arms without bothering to let us in on it, and one of the most convincing sister-bonding moments ever happens when Pauline (Jennifer Jason-Leigh) and Margot are whinging about their childhood hardships and agree that a third sister had it worst, having been "raped by the horsemaster." Then, with perfect timing, they bust into hysterics, the kind of dark-edged laughter that only comrades-at-arms who've charged through the battle jointly can access.
In fact, the sister dynamic rings wildly true. A screaming match in which long withheld and fiercely hurtful things are voiced cuts to the two sisters with their kids staying in the same hotel room. Pieces of the argument get picked up and let go again but there's no hurt silence, no sense that relations might be broken. Blood and deep history and, finally, habit, outlast all animosities.
And the performances are good. Kidman manages a hard role well, and Jack Black and Jennifer Jason-Leigh are now one of my favorite screen couples. Black's (often delightful, sure) tendency toward hamminess gets reigned in by Baumbach's preference for the po-faced and wry to good ends, and Jason-Leigh gets exponentially better as she ages. The years have mellowed her lockjawed tenseness but that strong focus is still there, and her traditional forte, that quick-jump between vulnerability and cynicism, feels less jarring but no less on-target now that she is relaxed. She was always interesting to watch, sexy and intense; nowadays she's fun, too.
This is Baumbach's second film examining family, the Squid and the Whale being the first, and in both he says things on the subject that nobody else does. Or at least he says them without blunting the edges with cuteness, which is what generally drives me into fits of growling and hissing during indie-films-about-quirky-families. He ably sidesteps possible pretension in use of metaphor: a tree and a dog become symbols, but simple ones, animated into double-meaning in much the same almost automatic way we do it in real life. He uses background silence to great advantage, with little or no score to intrude on the action, and gives his performers room to maneuver with long, moving shots in which they can build up a head of mutual steam.
Too much comedy is unfunny because it depends on character types instead of characters. It's the commedia dell'arte thing: you set up a type, we all know what to expect from it, it either falls absurdly headfirst into our expectations or cheats them. Either way, we laugh if it's well performed and we don't if it's not. Baumbach isn't interested in that. His stuff is swarthy and rich with the complexities of human interaction. He doesn't shy from emotional brutality, but avoids romanticizing it, too. Even when his people do and say dastardly things, he manages to keep a good beating heart at the core of the film, avoiding jadedness and prolonged despair. I suspect there's no one else quite like him making films today. Certainly he avoids the slickness of surface-gliding which some complain earmarks Anderson in his worst moments.
In summary: these are not feel-good hits of the season. On those vulnerable nights when you want something easy and thoughtless, this particular shelf should be avoided. Save them, Baumbach in particular, for the strong nights when you feel like laughing in the face of the thunderstorm.
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