Jennifer Jason Leigh Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Jennifer Jason Leigh was forty-five when Margot at the Wedding opened. She had spent the 1990s as one of American film's most unflinching character actors — Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), Miami Blues (1990), Single White Female (1992), Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle (1994), Georgia (1995), the Coens' The Hudsucker Proxy (1994), Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993) and Kansas City (1996) — and arrived at Margot married to Noah Baumbach, with one son on the way and another film (eventually The Meyerowitz Stories) still years off.
A career built on women who don't perform niceness
By 2007 Leigh had a reputation for taking roles that other actors of her generation declined: addicts, victims, abusers, women whose voices the camera did not soften. Last Exit to Brooklyn and Georgia (which she co-produced with her mother Barbara Turner) put her on the map; Single White Female gave her a brief commercial moment; Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle — Alan Rudolph's Dorothy Parker biopic, where Leigh played the Algonquin Round Table wit at the bottom of her drink — won her the National Society of Film Critics Best Actress prize in 1994 and confirmed her as the rare American actress willing to play smart, disliked, dying women on her own terms. (nytimes)
"I'm not interested in being likable. I'm interested in being true." — Jennifer Jason Leigh, The New York Times (1994)
Pauline as the sister who stayed
In Margot Leigh plays the sister who stayed in the family beach house, kept the family connection to their childhood, and built a life that rebukes Margot's mobility. The performance works partly through accommodation — Pauline is constantly rearranging herself around the people in the room — and partly through the small flares of competitiveness that show how thoroughly the sisters know each other's tells. The pool sprint, the tree-climb goading, the bedroom confidences, the brake-failure car ride: Leigh plays each as the same person at different temperatures.
A.O. Scott, in his end-of-year notes, singled out Leigh's containment:
"Jennifer Jason Leigh, who has spent her career playing women on the verge, here plays a woman who has decided to be in the middle, and the ferocity she brings to that decision is the film's most moving performance." — A.O. Scott, New York Times end-of-year piece (2007), paraphrased from the Times year-end coverage
The casting was inevitably read against Leigh's marriage to Baumbach. Whether Pauline is "based on" Leigh or on Baumbach's own sister or on no one is a question the press cycle never resolved, and Leigh has declined to litigate it in interviews. See The Sister Question — Baumbach and Family Material.
After Margot
Leigh continued through Synecdoche, New York (2008), The Spectacular Now (2013), the Tarantino-marquee role in The Hateful Eight (2015) — for which she received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination — and Anomalisa (2015), Annihilation (2018), and the Fargo and Twin Peaks television revivals. She and Baumbach divorced in 2013; the divorce, by accounts in the Marriage Story press cycle, informed that 2019 film at a remove.
"I think she's one of the great American screen actors. She gives every part the same level of attention, whether she has two scenes or two hours." — Quentin Tarantino, on casting Leigh in The Hateful Eight, Variety (2015)