Leigh brings home to work with her

Jennifer Jason Leigh and Noah Baumbach would like to clarify the chief misunderstanding about their collaboration on “Margot at the Wedding.” Yes, the husband and wife independent film stalwarts took full advantage of their intimate acquaintance while working together for the first time, a creative symbiosis that has yielded the year’s most emotionally wrenching family dramedy. But corner them on the subject and both will tell you that the movie was never intended to become a family affair.

Which is to say that “Margot” wasn’t conceived as a vehicle for Leigh -- indie moviedom’s answer to Meryl Streep -- even if her writer-director husband coaxed a performance from the actress that’s certain to help define Leigh’s already distinguished 26-year career. And although Baumbach solicited his wife’s input for every draft of the script he churned out, relying on her “impressions” to shape dialogue and story structure, he insists that the character of Pauline -- a pill-popping, newly pregnant bohemian struggling to reconcile things with her sister, Nicole Kidman’s titular Margot -- wasn’t written with Leigh, or anybody else, in mind.

Ultimately, Baumbach (who received an Oscar nomination for writing the 2005 divorce drama “The Squid and the Whale”) says there was no eureka moment to the casting, just a gradual realization that she was the one. Then, once they were on set in the Hamptons last year, Baumbach persuaded Leigh to let her art imitate her life.

“I would twist myself into a pretzel trying to avoid doing anything that was close to me,” Leigh said. “But even though I’m nothing like Pauline, there’s a lot more of me in how I play her than in other roles I’ve taken. That, only Noah could get.”

In a separate interview, Baumbach talked about how the performance captures something of Leigh’s essential nature. “There’s a gentleness and lightness and humor that are very true of her personality,” he said. “Because I have the privilege of knowing her so well, I found a way to bring that out.”

Leigh, 45, summed up their working relationship more succinctly. “Noah knows when I’m acting, and he doesn’t want to see acting,” she said.

Sisterly rapport

The film’s flashier role goes to Kidman as a narcissistic, New York novelist who travels to New England for Pauline’s wedding, accompanied by her adolescent son, Claude (Zane Pais). At the sisters’ family home, Margot meets Pauline’s unemployed fiance (Jack Black) and plants the seed of discontent that threatens to derail their nuptials. Along the way, Kidman’s character breathlessly assails Claude’s conception of self, exacerbates her love-hate relationship with Pauline and contemplates leaving her husband (John Turturro) for her lover, played by Ciaran Hinds.

Reviews of “Margot,” which premiered in late August at the Telluride Film Festival and went into limited theatrical release Friday, have been mixed so far, with some critics praising Leigh and Kidman’s conflicted sororal rapport. “I always felt she believed I was her sister and I was Pauline,” Leigh said. “I think we approached the work in a similar way.”

Other reviewers, however, complained about the characters’ all-consuming self-absorption. Still, Leigh’s portrayal of a hippie in love is cited as a standout. “Leigh . . . gives one of the best, and certainly the most intriguingly complex performances of her career,” said a review in the Hollywood Reporter.

For Black, Leigh’s sense of purpose helped assuage apprehensions the comedian had in laying himself emotionally (and physically) naked for his uncharacteristically dramatic part. “I had to show some darker sides of myself in ‘Margot’ than I have in roles past,” Black said in an e-mail. “It was challenging. I was most worried about the crying scenes and the nudity. . . . But I sucked it up and went to those places because I just had to look over at Jennifer, who was so fearless in her performance.”

By her own admission, Leigh put her movie career on the back burner after becoming disenchanted with Hollywood. Although she has appeared in films by a who’s who of acclaimed indie auteurs -- the Coen brothers, Todd Solondz, Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson and Jane Campion among them -- Leigh has only worked sporadically in film since co-writing, -directing, -producing and starring in the 2001 ensemble drama-comedy “The Anniversary Party.” Instead, she’s kept busy appearing on and off Broadway in New York in plays such as “Proof” and “Abigail’s Party.” And since marrying Baumbach two years ago, Leigh has turned down any movie she didn’t wholeheartedly “believe in.”

“I feel like as I’m getting older, I’m responding less and less to the scripts I’ve been reading,” she said. “Also, when you fall in love, you don’t want to go away on location.”

One notable exception: Last summer, New York-based Leigh went before the camera for Oscar-winning “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” screenwriter Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut, “Synecdoche, New York.” She remained schtum about that film, except to say, “There’s doppelgangers and it takes place over 50 years.”

Asked whether she and Baumbach have plans to parlay their creative chemistry into multiple husband-wife film outings a la John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands, Leigh laughed.

“I love this movie. I feel quite spoiled by it,” Leigh said. “I love working with Noah in whatever capacity. Our taste is very similar. I trust his sensibility, and I love that kind of intimacy. We’re good together in that way.”

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chris.lee@latimes.com