Plot Summary (Margot at the Wedding) Margot at the Wedding (2007)
Margot and Claude arrive at the family beach house
Margot (Nicole Kidman), a Manhattan novelist, takes a commuter train out to Long Island with her eleven-year-old son Claude (Zane Pais). She has switched seats away from "the wrong person" and tells Claude not to look back.b1 They arrive at the family beach house — formerly the sisters' childhood home, now occupied by Margot's estranged sister Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) — to find Pauline mid-skirmish with the neighboring Voglers over a large old tree leaning over the property line. Pauline's fiancé Malcolm (Jack Black) appears, mustachioed and bearish, an unemployed musician/painter/letter-writer.b3
In the bedroom Pauline confides that she is pregnant — very early, and has not told Malcolm or her daughter Ingrid (Flora Cross).b5 Margot files the secret as material. Within hours she is on the phone to her husband Jim (John Turturro) reading Malcolm out as "completely unattractive" and "a letter writer," then telling the half-asleep Claude — under cover of his probably-not-remembering — that Pauline is pregnant and concealing it.b8
The tree climb undermines Margot's authority for the first time
Pauline goads Margot to climb the contested tree the way she did as a child. Ingrid joins in: "Do it now, Margot." Margot agrees. She grunts up the trunk, gets stuck partway, comes down breathing hard, has to dig a bug out of her ear, and snaps at Claude for taking pleasure in her embarrassment.b9 b10 The film's first physical undermining of the diagnostic-from-above stance: Margot cannot perform her former self in front of the family she keeps placing herself above.
Pauline mentions that Claude could hand out programs at the wedding; Margot mentions, separately, that she has agreed to a public conversation Friday at the local bookstore and now regrets it.b11 The Friday event is planted. So is the parallel affair: Pauline confirms that the bookstore interviewer is the local writer Dick Koosman (Ciarán Hinds), with whom Margot is collaborating on a screenplay — a fact Margot has not mentioned.b12
The Koosman pool, the car ride, and Maisy planted
At Dick's pool the Koosman family is introduced: Dick's teenage daughter Maisy (Halley Feiffer), present but not swimming. Dick tells Claude — while Margot and Pauline race in the water — that he and Claude's father Jim once shared a thesis advisor at Stanford, and that he once dated Margot.b13 Pauline wins the sprint; Claude says Margot cheated.b14
Driving back from a restaurant Malcolm holds forth on his Hannah-Arendt-via-Eichmann theory of women drivers; Malcolm panics that he's lost the brakes for a second; Pauline calls Malcolm incompetent; Malcolm pulls over and tells everyone to drive themselves home.b15 Dick presses Margot to come spend the night. Margot deflects with the news: "She's pregnant."b16 The sisterly secret leaks sideways. In Ingrid's bedroom, Ingrid asks Claude if he is obsessed with Maisy and says he has a moustache; Claude says, "My mom bleaches it." Down the hall, Malcolm shaves off his own moustache.b17 b18
Jim arrives, and the slipper scene
Margot's husband Jim drives out unannounced, and the family lunch becomes a thicket of school logistics — Stuyvesant, Bronx Science, Packer.b24 Margot opens her gift from Jim — slippers — and tells him flatly that getting a present she already owns makes her feel like he doesn't know her.b25 Driving Jim back, the family hits a dog. Jim stops; Margot will not get out. "I wouldn't have stopped," she tells Jim plainly.b26 Outside the vet she tells him she hates herself when she's with him.b27
In the yard Margot and Pauline have the closest thing to a sisterly confession — Pauline says they are at the age where they become invisible to men; Margot says she has no people in the world she loves more than her family.b28 Then Margot says it: Pauline shouldn't marry Malcolm.b29
The bookstore interview breaks Margot
At the local bookstore Dick Koosman takes the interview chair across from Margot in front of an audience. He probes the loathsome father in her story "Middle Children," then asks how autobiographical the portrait is. Margot answers that her father was loving. Dick presses: but might the father in fact be a portrait of you. She tries to recover with a long, derailing anecdote about a Whirlpool repairman she became afraid of, eventually trailing off into "I think it was Frigidaire who made our fridge." She asks for a moment, walks off, and into someone's ear whispers: "You're an asshole."b32 The practiced observer is observed in public by another practitioner of the form. Her authority is gone. (See The Bookstore Reading.)
Malcolm confesses; the wedding collapses
In bed Pauline pushes Malcolm on his correspondence with a 20-year-old student. He concedes a kiss — "really, it was hardly a kiss" — then upgrades it to tongues, made out. Outside, the chainsaw is on the tree.b34 At the wedding-tent setup the next day, Wizard the dog and Maisy both go missing and reappear together. Dick arrives, tackles Malcolm in front of the half-built tent, and beats him while Malcolm shouts he didn't do anything; Dick tells Malcolm he doesn't ever want to see him again.b35 Margot tells Pauline she has to leave with her.
The contested tree falls, narrowly missing Ingrid. The sisters and children load the car; Margot drives. On the road Pauline announces the brakes are bad; Margot pulls over. Pauline says quietly: "I've ruined these shoes." Ingrid asks if her mother pooped her pants.b36 Margot is now at the wheel of her sister's full physical breakdown.
The bus stop
Back at the house Margot tells Claude there is a bus to Vermont in the morning; his father will pick him up. Aren't you coming? "No." Why not? Because she has to help Pauline and Ingrid.b37 Pauline catches Margot with a notebook, threatens to take her bowels out if Margot writes about any of this, then climbs into bed beside her, pregnant and hot, complaining about her feet.b38 Malcolm calls. He apologizes through tears, asks her to please marry him. Pauline says he can't do that again. He promises. She suggests they do another seminar.b39 Margot listens from the next room. The interventionist project is decisively defeated.
In the morning the mother and other sister Becky arrive unannounced with ice cream — Pauline's cancellation message never delivered.b40 Margot hurries Claude past them to the bus. At the small-town stop Claude pleads: come with me. "No. You know that." He pleads again — please come, Mom. "Stop it, okay? Stop it." Margot recalls that as a small boy he wouldn't play unless she was watching, always afraid she would go out the back door — "Our backyard didn't lead anywhere."b41 She tells him to go.
The bus pulls out. Margot stands. Then she runs — "Wait! Wait! Wait! Wait!" — chases it down the road, catches it, boards.b42 On the moving bus Margot and Claude sit together, both winded. Claude: "Did you see me running out there?" Margot: "Yeah." A beat. "That was a lot of running." "I'm out of breath." Karen Dalton's "Something's on your mind" comes up over the credits.b43 Nothing in the larger family system has been repaired — Pauline has already taken Malcolm back, the wedding tent is smashed, the tree is felled, the mother and other sister stand uncomprehending in the driveway — but Margot is on this bus with this child, and the film ends there.