Margot's Stories vs. Margot's Life Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Margot is a writer. She publishes short stories in The New Yorker. She is at the family beach house this weekend partly to do a public bookstore interview about her recent fiction. The film is therefore, among other things, a study of what a writer's life looks like when the writer's principal material is the people the writer knows. Margot uses her family in her fiction; the film uses Margot in its fiction; the question of what gets used and how is folded into the film's argument.
What Margot writes
The film names two specific Margot stories:
- "Middle Children" — the story Dick Koosman interviews her about at the bookstore midpoint. The story features a "loathsome" father figure; Dick presses on the autobiographical content; Margot deflects toward her actual father (loving) and then is asked whether the father in the story might in fact be a portrait of herself.b32
- An untitled New Yorker story — Pauline tells someone in the bookstore audience that this story used things she had told Margot in confidence, and that she thinks the story helped end her marriage to Lenny.b31
The two stories together establish the pattern. Margot writes from family material; she does not always tell the people the material is taken from; the writing damages the relationships it draws on; and the writer's eye and the writer's tongue are the same instrument deployed in different rooms.
The bookstore as the writer's life inverted
The midpoint structurally inverts the Margot-as-writer pattern. For most of the film Margot is the observer: she watches her family and then writes them, or watches her family and then narrates them aloud to other family members. At the bookstore, she becomes the observed; another writer (Dick) does to her what she does to her relatives. See The Bookstore Reading.
The Whirlpool / Frigidaire digression in that scene is technically interesting because it is a piece of Margot's autobiographical material being generated in real time as a defensive deflection. She is producing, under pressure, the kind of material she would normally turn into a story — and the brand-name slip ("I think it was Frigidaire who made our fridge") is the moment the production becomes visible to the producer.
"Kidman holds a five-minute beat of escalating disorientation without indicating any of it. The Whirlpool story is the most extraordinary single passage of acting in the film." — A.O. Scott, paraphrased from New York Times end-of-year coverage (2007)
Pauline's threat
The post-soiling-scene confrontation at beat 38 is the film's clearest moment of family member naming the writer's habit as theft. Pauline catches Margot with a notebook and tells her she cannot write about this; she has already taken Lenny and Pauline herself; she will take Margot's bowels out if she sees a story with a hotel room in it.b38
The threat is partly comic and partly serious. Pauline knows Margot well enough to know that the writer's instinct will turn this weekend into a story; the threat is the pre-emptive demand that she not. The film does not show whether Margot writes the story. The film itself is the story, of course; Baumbach is using sister material in roughly the way Margot would use sister material. The recursive joke runs underneath the surface for the audience that catches it.
Baumbach as Margot's mirror
The film's most-discussed extra-textual question is whether Margot is a stand-in for Baumbach. Baumbach is a writer-director who uses family material; Margot is a writer who uses family material. Baumbach was married to Jennifer Jason Leigh, who plays Pauline; Margot is sister to Pauline. The audience is invited to read the film as Baumbach examining his own writer's instinct through a character whose practice of that instinct produces clearly visible damage. See The Sister Question — Baumbach and Family Material.
"Baumbach is asking, through Margot, whether what he does for a living is defensible. The film does not give a clean answer. It gives a bus ride." — Richard Brody, paraphrased from The New Yorker (2017)
The diagnostic gaze as writer's tool
The film's larger argument about the diagnostic-from-outside approach maps directly onto the writer's working method. The writer's eye treats people as material. The diagnostic gaze treats people as cases. The two are the same instrument, deployed at the page or at the dinner table. Margot at the Wedding is the case the film stages for what happens when that instrument is used at home for a weekend.
The Two Approaches reading (see Plot Structure (Margot at the Wedding)) places the post-midpoint approach as drop-the-apartness. For a writer, this would mean: stop using the family as material; stop standing at the curb of their lives with a notebook; be in the room as a person rather than as an observer. The film does not stage Margot deciding to stop writing. It stages Margot getting on a bus with her son. The implication — and it is only an implication — is that the same instinct that makes Margot run after the bus would make her, eventually, write differently.
What gets written about, what gets remembered
A small but important detail: at beat 8, Margot tells the half-asleep Claude that Pauline is pregnant, prefacing it with the assumption that he won't remember.b8 The assumption is itself a writer's calculation — what can be said because it will not be remembered. The writer's eye is also an actuarial calculation about audience and recall. Margot uses Claude as a mute audience for her observations; the film registers the calculation without comment.