Extra! Extra! Noah Baumbach Movie More Awkward Then A Your Mom Joke at Your Mom's Funeral

Thanks to the inestimable Dinsky, I saw the movie Margot At The Wedding by Noah Baumbach yesterday. In a bit of strangeness, I apparently have never seen a Noah Baumbach movie. I am moved slightly to do so in the future (in regards to The Squid and the Whale and Kicking and Screaming), so as to get a better handle on his quirks and determine if the nature of Margot was an overarching trajectory of his writing and directing, or if it was simply a study in meta-awkwardness.

That phrase. Does it mean what I think it means in this case? My perception of the film as a whole was that on every level Baumbach sought to inject awkwardness. If that was his goal, he succeeded. Which could be genius. Or maybe it was unintentional. In which case its just poor writing, storytelling, filming, etc.... The real beauty is that you can't really tell. Even if I watch his other movies and see the same overarching sense of WTF developing, it could indicate a kind of artistic integrity. Or, once again, ineptitude. In any case. Awkwardness.

Individual lines would crackle with it (what would be the most fucked up word I can throw in to this one line).

Conversations were derailed with it (what one sentence could single-handedly cause this conversation to take a detour into awkward country - a place much like flavor country, but with far less puffing and cowboys, and more shoe gazing, shoulder hunching, and unavoidable silences).

Awkward family dynamic? Check. Not only is there an Oedipus complex thing going - I swear the thirteen (fourteen?) year old son got more facefuls of mom nipple then a breast feeding baby does in its first year of life. And, how often does a mom kiss her thirteen year old son on the lips? It appears to happen in almost every other scene here. At one point in the movie it looks like -for a moment- cousin love is blooming, and that shit looks rational and non-awkward compared to the other family stuff preceding it. Which is awkward in itself. To think that cousin love is less fucked up then the alternative? And that's just the sexual portion of it.

You also have the fucked up hyper-critical shit that Margot throws in her son's direction. My recollection of the movie has him crying once at the things that she's saying to him (although I think there's a bout of frustrated screaming in between train cars at the beginning - at the time presented it was so out of context that Maya asked whether we had missed something. Nope. They were just sitting silently on a train. He gets up. Heads between cars and starts screaming. Obviously he's got some issues. Which we find to be a truth fact as soon as his mom has her first line of dialog)

Awkwardly shot scenes? Check. At one point Margot is sharing a bed in a hotel with her sister, and it's framed as if the scene is going to devolve into the sisters making out. I asked Maya what the most awkward thing that could happen there would be and her response was indeed of the "I think they're going to make out" variety. But with the scene framed the way it was, that would be too much of the logical conclusion. Instead it lets you draw your own conclusion about what might be going down and then shifts in a different direction altogether.

Awkward pacing? Check. The narrative seems crafted to jump up and down in a way that keeps your eyebrows arched in perpetual what-the-fuckery.

Awkwardly ended? Of course. The ending is practically not an ending at all. It jumps at you at a surprising moment. When it happened, I knew it was the ending only because I asked myself, what would the most awkward way to end this be. The answer was of course if it cut to credits at that moment. And boom. Credits.

And despite all that, I can't say that it was awful. In fact, through the entire thing it kept me guessing at what the next source of awkwardness would be. And I felt a sense of self-gratification every time my answer to the question "What would make this more awkward?" actually manifested itself on the screen.