Margot at the Wedding, the latest exercise in human misery from Squid and the Whale writer/director Noah Baumbach, is an interesting study on character development for budding screenwriters. One that should help writers avoid a few common pitfalls. The father-son dynamic in Squid and the Whale brilliantly highlighted recognizable human flaws that come as a byproduct of not just divorce, but also parenthood. Baumbach tries a similar exercise in the simultaneous love-hate of family with his sisters in Margot at the Wedding, played by Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh, but ends up with characters that the audience not only can't identify with, but might not like at all. A key question comes to mind... Does Noah Baumbach like the people he's writing about? The characters are put through the paces in an attempt to turn their outright misery into comedy. Jack Black's character, supposedly the lovable loser Malcolm, wears a mustache for half the film because he thinks it's funny. It doesn't work.

In the opening scenes of Margot at the Wedding we meet the title character, a frigid author played with icy perfection by Nicole Kidman. Margot is on her way with her son Claude (Zane Pais) to the wedding of her estranged sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) to Malcolm (Jack Black), a man that the snobby Margot clearly thinks is beneath her family tree. She doesn't even consider the basically-unemployed Malcolm worthy of a shrub next to her family tree and you can feel the poisonous nature of her intentions immediately. In the days before the wedding, Margot and Pauline trade passive-aggressive jabs like suburban prizefighters. Pauline is pregnant, a fact that she hasn't told her daughter or fiancee, but she chooses to tell her sister. Margot is leaving her husband, a fact that she hasn't told her son, but chooses to tell her sister. It's like handing ammunition to two warring countries. You know it will get used eventually.

Squid and the Whale worked because it crafted such a believably painful family dynamic, one that many accused Baumbach of being autobiographical. The film nailed a lot of the way fathers and sons communicate (or fail to) in the middle of a divorce, but Margot at the Wedding falls short because of the way the sisters speak to each other. The keen ear for dialogue evident in Squid has been replaced by lines that "feel like" the way women should speak, which makes the dialogue more false than believable. Margot is such a shrill, cruel woman. She's one of those people who’s only happy when others around her are miserable, and who tries to one-up you in the misery battle at all times. Happiness scares Margot more than anything else and she'll do whatever it takes to torpedo her own, her sister's, or her son's. In other words, no one will care. There's no reason at all not to hope that Margot gets hit by a truck and left by the side of the road. From a development standpoint, the main challenge with Margot at the Wedding appeares to be... How do you write a character as flawed as Margot and still give her enough redeeming qualities that audience will still want to see her make it through the day? It's a corner many writers back themselves into.

Despite the film's flaws, Margot at the Wedding does one thing incredibly right... casting. Margot would have been even more tedious in the hands of lesser actresses. Nicole Kidman nails every shade of this character. You can feel the cold emanating from her skin. And Jennifer Jason Leigh is even better. People similar to the Margot character need people like Pauline to abuse and use, to make themselves feel better, but Leigh doesn't play Pauline as a victim. She makes so many correct acting decisions that you'll be reminded within ten minutes how much you've missed her on the big screen (her last major role was six years ago). The movie world is a lot better off when Leigh is working regularly.

Like I mentioned, Margot at the Wedding is an interesting study on character development for budding screenwriters. You can write vicious, evil people, but you need to make the audience care about them, even the people around them, to stay interested and invested for an entire film. Outside of the two lead performances, there's no insight, character, comedy, or effective drama at this Wedding.