The Bookstore Reading Margot at the Wedding (2007)
The bookstore interview — Dick Koosman in the interviewer's chair across from Margot in front of an audience — is the film's structural midpoint and the moment Margot's diagnostic-from-outside approach is broken on her in public, by another practitioner of the form.b32
How the scene plays
At the local Long Island bookstore Dick takes the interview chair across from Margot. He probes the loathsome father in her short 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. Margot tries to recover with a long, derailing anecdote about a Whirlpool repairman she became afraid of and called Jim home from NYU about, 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 scene runs approximately five minutes in the finished cut. Savides shoots it primarily in two-shot and over-shoulder, with the audience visible behind both interviewer and interviewee. The lighting is fluorescent and unflattering. Both performances are calibrated against each other in long takes.
What Dick is doing
Pauline has already named the writer's eye as an attack vehicle in the immediately preceding scene — she tells someone in the audience that Margot used things she had told her in confidence in a New Yorker story.b31 Dick performs the same operation on Margot in the chair: he uses the practiced moves of a literary interviewer (start with the work, ask about autobiography, push past the deflection) to do to Margot what Margot does to her family at the dinner table. The cruelty is professional. He has done this hundreds of times.
"Hinds is doing something subtle and frightening — playing a man whose charm and his cruelty are not separate qualities but the same skill applied at different angles." — Manohla Dargis, paraphrased from New York Times (2007)
The film is precise about why the interview lands as cruelty rather than as conversation: Dick is also Margot's lover. He has been pressing her to spend the night with him; she has deflected. The bookstore is, among other things, his retaliation. The professional interlocutor uses his professional tools because his personal tools have failed.
The Whirlpool digression
The Whirlpool / Frigidaire digression is the technical center of Kidman's performance. Margot uses a long, autobiographical-feeling anecdote — the repairman, calling Jim home from NYU — as a derailment, but the derailment is itself the kind of material Margot would normally use as a writer. She is producing in real time the kind of writing-from-life Pauline has accused her of. The brand-name slip ("I think it was Frigidaire who made our fridge") is the moment the performance becomes visible to the speaker as performance, and she stops.
"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)
"You're an asshole"
The whispered "You're an asshole" is the only moment Margot is allowed direct retaliation, and the film places it offstage of the audience inside the diegetic bookstore. Margot whispers it into someone's ear on the way out. The audience at the reading does not hear it; the film audience does. The line is a small private thing said in the wreckage of a public thing — exactly the inverse of the film's larger pattern, where Margot's public diagnoses produce private wreckage in her family.
The structural pivot
After the bookstore, Margot's authority is gone for the rest of the film. Pauline has to manage Claude's read of her on the way home;b33 the diagnostic interventions Margot continues to make land worse than they did before; her affair with Dick is over off-screen, registered only in passing comment. The midpoint is not a turning point in Margot's behavior — she keeps trying to manage Pauline's life — but in her authority to do so. Everything after the bookstore is drift. See Plot Structure (Margot at the Wedding).
"Baumbach's films are conversations the audience overhears at the worst possible moment in a relationship. The bookstore in Margot is the worst possible moment Baumbach has ever staged." — Richard Brody, paraphrased from The New Yorker (2017)