(Click here for the trailer.)(Be Advised - SPOILERS)
David and I took in "Margot at the Wedding" after a pretty good, but kinda-expensive-for-this-town Thai meal at Oshas. It was playing at the Embarcadero theater, which I'm guessing either is financed by a cinema sugar daddy/momma, or runs guns out of the back entrance, because with the wacky and oddball films they run, how do they possibly afford the rent at their location? But it's a nice theater, with good coffee and a nice, mature staff that never seemed to have had to read an employees manual--i.e., are not nice by design. (Going to the AMC 1000 on Van Ness is like being in my suburban mall haunts as a kid, with angst personified giving me my popcorn and coke.)
"Margot" reminds me a bit of the other film I saw in the theaters recently, "No Country for Old Men." Both are like slightly different hell realms. Both are visions of a life without Spirit, though "Country" is much more totalisistic in its vision. "Margot" doesn't say there isn't Spirit anywhere, it just focuses its lens in a way that excludes Spirit from the frame. Or even just a representative of sane human relationships.
"Margot" tells the story of two sisters coming back together after several years of estrangement, for the event of one of the sister's wedding. The details are not very important, nor the plot. It's the portrait of scathing dysfunction that's the real raison d'être, scathing not because it is writ so large or luridly, but because it is so unconscious and common.
Margot, the titular character played by Nicole Kidman, can't reflect on herself with any effectiveness; her sister says, "She can be a monster when she's angry." But it seems that she's angry all the time, and for her, that means attacking wherever it will hurt the other. She is brutal energy channeled through sophisticated means. She has gathered language and culture to her as a way to defend a fragile, scarred interior. Her way of creating a sense of safety and control in her life is to destabilize others. At the beginning of the film, she criticizes her son for not wearing his new glasses, and then at the end, when he puts them on to prepare for his solo bus ride away from his mother, she says, "They make your face look fat." Her persona is that of an aware, observing woman, but what she does and says is disjointed and fragmented, because her m.o. is not truth but defense. She says to her sister, "I'm a speaker of truth," while delivering a cruel verbal blow.
The other characters are not much more developed than her, though their personas are of relative sophisticates. Jack Black's character, the groom to be, is perhaps a bit more honest in his being "cognitively disheveled" (one of my favorite phrases from Ken Wilber), but really, they all are lost in the idea that their beliefs and thoughts are true and coherent. These are very lost people who are "very" lost because even their attempts at self-reflection can find nothing substantial to rest their gaze on.
They are not empty people here, just internally fractured, with "self-knowledge" which is created as works of fiction, not the result of self-inquiry. Margot doesn't know herself: she either holds concepts about herself ("I'm a speaker of truth") or touches on her own pain and pathology, but looks away so quickly, distorting her vision with self-disgust, that she can't learn from her seeing.
These are people who don't learn because they essentially cannot tolerate their own pain long enough to have it tell them about who they are. Jack Black's character says at the end of the film, as he's unraveling, "I ate the cake and I don't know why." There's a surface cohesion to these psyches which is belayed by their disjointed actions and words. Often communications will drop from each mouth to plunk in the mud at the others feet, without being picked up and understood. "I masturbated last night," says the son out of the blue, before getting on the bus to leave his mother. "You don't have to tell me things like that," says Margot, not stopping to understand or reflect on her son's confession, or maybe sharing.
These are damaged people in sophisticated personas, which makes them more toxic to each other than the merely ignorant. This is what mind-fucking is about, and it's often coming from people whose selves are broken and the fragments are being defended even more fiercely for the brokenness. Margot is a legion of lawyers charged with protecting a pile of shattered glass.
But like "Country," it's a particular hell, and it's a big mistake to view it as any coherent vision of life. "Margot" is what life looks like for a child stuck within their toxic family. There's no way out, there's no sane "other," there's no sanctuary of escape. Such a child does the best they can to survive and protect their Self from the literate and sophisticated desperation of their parents, trying to experience love despite its union with pain.
"Margot" has a claustrophobic pain which describes a particular type of family, not families as entities, or life as an experience. "Margot" has no one who sees it clearly; even Baumbaugh, the director, seems to be grasping for sanity simply by articulating the insane. But there's no sense of seeing these people, this hell realm, in perspective, in relationship to what is sane, grounded, and self-aware. There's no mature touchstone anywhere in the film, which is what makes it a partial vision, the depiction of a family made hellish because there's no "outside."
Not to say I didn't like it. I did like the film, quite a bit. And I felt empathy for the people. I just wouldn't want them anywhere near me.
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