Mid-2000s American Indie Margot at the Wedding (2007)

Margot at the Wedding opened during one of the most extraordinary single quarters in modern American studio cinema. Paramount Vantage — Paramount's specialty division established in 2006 — released a four-film slate in late 2007 that included two eventual Best Picture nominees and one winner. The slate was: No Country for Old Men (Joel and Ethan Coen, November 9), Margot at the Wedding (November 16), There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, December 26), and Atonement (Joe Wright, December 7). Two of those four films are widely considered among the greatest of the 21st century. Margot was the slate's commercial disappointment.

Paramount Vantage's brief life

Paramount Vantage was a 2005 reorganization of Paramount Classics, intended to give the studio a prestige indie label comparable to Sony Pictures Classics, Fox Searchlight, Universal's Focus Features, and Warner Independent Pictures. John Lesher ran it. The label's 2006 launch slate (Babel, An Inconvenient Truth) was promising; the 2007 slate was extraordinary; the 2008 follow-up (Defiance, The Visitor, Revolutionary Road) was solid but less commercially robust. By late 2008 the parent company had decided the label was duplicative; Lesher left to run United Artists in early 2009; the label was effectively folded back into Paramount.

The Vantage moment captures something specific about mid-2000s American studio appetite for prestige indie: between roughly 2003 and 2008, every major studio was running a specialty label, and the labels were collectively producing more substantive prestige cinema than the major studios themselves. The 2008 financial crisis and the 2009 collapse of the DVD-driven backend market killed the model; by 2010 most of the labels had closed or contracted.

The 2007 slate as cultural document

Of the four Vantage films released in late 2007:

  • No Country for Old Men won Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Supporting Actor (Javier Bardem). It is widely considered the Coens' major film and one of the great American films of the century.
  • There Will Be Blood received eight Academy Award nominations and won Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis and Best Cinematography for Robert Elswit. Its critical standing has only grown since 2007; it is now frequently cited as the single best American film of the decade.
  • Atonement received seven Academy Award nominations and won Best Original Score. It is the most commercially successful of the four (over $130 million worldwide gross).
  • Margot at the Wedding received no major nominations and grossed under $4 million worldwide. It was the slate's least commercially successful and most critically divisive entry.

The asymmetry is structurally interesting. Three of the four films are large-canvas prestige pictures; Margot is a chamber piece. Three are visually maximalist (the Coens' Texas vistas, Anderson's California oil fields, Wright's Dunkirk); Margot is visually minimalist (Long Island in autumn). Three are written from outside their characters; Margot is written from inside hers.

"The Paramount Vantage slate of fall 2007 is one of the most remarkable single-season prestige releases in American studio history. It is the moment when the indie-major hybrid actually delivered on what it had been promising for a decade." — A.O. Scott, paraphrased from New York Times end-of-year coverage (2007)

Other 2007 American indie releases

The broader 2007 American indie field was equally rich. Other key 2007 releases:

  • Juno (Jason Reitman, December) — Fox Searchlight; Best Original Screenplay winner; massive sleeper hit
  • Michael Clayton (Tony Gilroy, October) — Warner; Best Supporting Actress for Tilda Swinton
  • Into the Wild (Sean Penn, September) — Paramount Vantage Classics
  • Once (John Carney, May) — Fox Searchlight; Best Original Song winner
  • I'm Not There (Todd Haynes, November) — The Weinstein Company
  • The Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson, September) — Fox Searchlight
  • Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (Sidney Lumet, October) — ThinkFilm
  • Zodiac (David Fincher, March) — Paramount; arguably the year's most enduring single film

The cumulative effect was a year in which American serious cinema was almost embarrassingly strong. Margot arrived inside this density and got squeezed; the November 16 release date placed it directly between the Coens' film (the week before) and Atonement (three weeks later), and in the same general window as I'm Not There, No Country, and Beowulf.

Why Margot didn't break out

Several factors compounded the film's commercial disappointment:

  1. The chamber-piece form is rarely commercial. Even within the prestige indie market, audiences for single-location, dialogue-heavy family dramas are smaller than for road movies, period epics, or genre pieces.
  2. The deliberately drab visual register (Harris Savides's Available-Light Aesthetic) made the film hard to sell visually.
  3. The casual cruelty register of the dialogue alienated audiences expecting Baumbach to repeat the more comic register of The Squid and the Whale.
  4. The release-date squeeze between No Country and There Will Be Blood kept it out of the awards conversation that would have sustained it.
  5. The Pauline soiling scene generated word-of-mouth about the film's discomfort that hurt rather than helped its specialty release.

"Margot was the film in that 2007 Vantage slate that didn't fit. It is a smaller and harder picture than the others, and the audience that fall was looking for the Coen film and the Anderson film, not the Baumbach film." — Manohla Dargis, paraphrased from year-end coverage, New York Times (2007)

What the moment produced for indie cinema

The 2007 Vantage moment was the high-water mark of the studio-indie hybrid model. The 2008 financial crisis and the collapse of the DVD market changed the economics by 2010. Subsequent prestige indie has tended to migrate to streaming (Amazon, A24, Netflix); the studio-specialty-label model has not been replicated at scale. Margot at the Wedding is therefore a document of a moment that ended quickly: the brief window in which a major studio specialty label would put roughly $10 million behind a 90-minute chamber-piece sister-vs-sister drama and let it find its audience or fail to.

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