As Margot Zeller, short-story writer and title character of Noah Baumbach's "Margot at the Wedding" (showing Sunday at the New York Film Festival), Nicole Kidman is a moody, meddling and passive-aggressive nightmare.In Baumbach's follow-up to his commended 2005 comedy, "The Squid and the Whale," Margot is bringing along her teenager son (Zane Paris) to the wedding of her sister (Baumbach's real-life spouse Jennifer Jason Leigh) and approximately right away rains malice and hesitation upon the prospective groom, a endearing shlump named Malcolm (Jack Black).Nicole Kidman, emerged Friday at a press conference following an advance screening with Baumbach, Leigh and co-star John Turturro, was asked how it felt to play a mother with so much psychic baggage."Frightening," said Nicole Kidman, who is the mother of two children. "But when something's really well-written, all you have to do is put yourself into the director's world. I just got lost into the complicated nature of this person, the way she stings people and ultimately stings herself."Much like "Squid and the Whale," which was voted for an Oscar for best original screenplay, "Margot's" characters are dysfunctional urban sophisticates with literary pedigrees. Baumbach, the son of well-known writers, was asked (inevitably perhaps) whether this movie was autobiographical."No," he replied, but detailed by saying he had become somewhat maddened with the way in which interviewers persisted in asking about autobiographical elements in "Squid and the Whale."
A scene in the movie in which Margot is put under alike questioning, he said, sums up his own feeling about such inquiries."Margot at the Wedding" will be shown at Jazz at Lincoln Center's Rose Hall Oct. 7 at 7 p.m. and Oct. 8 at 12:30 p.m. It opens in New York and other choose cities in mid-November. Further information is available at http://www.filmlinc.com/.
