The Margot-Dick Bedroom Scene Margot at the Wedding (2007)

The film does not stage a sex scene between Margot and Dick. It stages two adjacent moments — the post-restaurant car-side exchange in which Dick presses Margot to come spend the night and Margot deflects with the news of Pauline's pregnancy, and the parallel domestic scenes between Margot and Dick that Baumbach handles almost entirely in implication. The "Margot-Dick bedroom scene" is therefore the cumulative figure of these smaller exchanges; the affair is established by accumulation rather than by a single staged consummation.^b16

The car-side press

After the disastrous restaurant ride home — Malcolm panicking that he's lost the brakes for a second, Pauline calling him incompetent, Malcolm telling everyone to drive themselves home — Dick presses Margot to come spend the night with him.^b16 Margot says she has Claude. Dick says he has been trying to get her up to Long Island all year. Margot deflects with: "She's pregnant." The affair is named, the sisterly secret is leaked sideways, and Margot's diagnostic-from-outside posture starts to crack on its own personal axis. The film does not show what happens after the deflection; it cuts away.

The choice not to stage the sex is consistent with the film's larger pattern. Baumbach does not have Margot performing intimacy on screen; he has her using the secret of her sister's pregnancy as a deflection from intimacy. The scene is about what Margot will weaponize in order to avoid being asked.

The pool establishing

The earlier Koosman pool scene — beat 13 — is where Dick is established as a charming local writer who has a history with Margot.^b13 Dick tells Claude, in passing, that he and Claude's father once shared a thesis advisor at Stanford and that he once dated Margot. The information drops casually to a child whose mother is busy losing a sprint nearby. Hinds plays the moment as social grace; the audience reads it as quiet predation, deferred.

"Hinds plays Dick the way a stage actor plays a Pinter character — with everything important left in the silences. The threat in his charm is the part you don't quite hear." — Manohla Dargis, paraphrased from New York Times (2007)

The bookstore as the consummation Baumbach actually stages

If the film is going to stage the consummation of the Margot/Dick relationship, it stages it at the bookstore midpoint — in the form of cruelty rather than sex.^b32 Dick uses the practiced moves of an interviewer to do to Margot what Margot does to her family. The intimacy is the cruelty. See The Bookstore Reading.

The film treats the bookstore as the actual sex scene — the moment of full physical exposure — and the avoided car-side press as the avoided foreplay. This is part of the film's argument about what Margot's intimacies actually are: she does not sleep with Dick, she lets Dick interview her in front of an audience, and the film is honest about which one is more revealing.

The affair's residue

After the bookstore, the affair effectively ends off-screen. Pauline mentions in passing during the post-bookstore drive that she thinks "it's over between Margot and Dick. He was so cruel to her today" — a casual aside that confirms what the scene has already shown.¹ The film does not stage a breakup; it has already staged the destruction in front of an audience.

"The Margot-Dick relationship in the film is the kind of affair smart people have when they have stopped wanting to be cared for. The bookstore is what they use each other for; the bedroom is what they don't quite use each other for." — Richard Brody, paraphrased from The New Yorker (2017)

What this means for the film's intimacy register

Margot at the Wedding contains no fully staged sex scenes. Pauline and Malcolm have a brief post-coital scene early in the film (beat 8 — the bedroom intercut with Margot on the phone to Jim);^b8 Malcolm and the unseen-by-the-camera student kissing is reported, not shown; the Maisy/Malcolm interaction at the wedding tent is reported, not shown. The film is reticent about bodies in the way it is voluble about words. The Margot-Dick relationship is the organizing case of this reticence: the most-discussed sexual relationship in the film is the one the film never depicts.