A difficult, unforgettable woman

While some writer-directors have a voice, Noah Baumbach’s ability to make people live and breathe is so formidable it’s more appropriate to say that he hears voices. In “Margot at the Wedding,” Baumbach’s unnerving film about impossible people, the voices he hears push at the boundaries of what we are willing to accept on screen.

Baumbach, as his Oscar-nominated screenplay for “The Squid and the Whale” underlined, is no stranger to difficult individuals. But, as played with an uncompromising fearlessness by Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh, the two sisters in “Margot” make the fracturing family at the heart of “Squid” look like the folks who live in “Little House on the Prairie.”

For there is a rawness to the characterization in this lacerating film that pushes family drama right to the edge. Although they are all unhappy in different ways, the characters in “Margot” are almost without exception difficult, unfocused, self-involved people who specialize in creating crises where none existed before. If the acting out of painful neuroses were an extreme sport, these people would be the world champions.

Very much first among unequals, Margot Zeller (Kidman) is a short story writer, “well known to a very few people,” she says with brazenly fake modesty, and a player on the New York literary scene.

The wedding of the title is not hers, it’s her sister Pauline’s (Leigh), a woman who lives in the old family home somewhere north of Manhattan. It’s where Margot and her androgynous 13-year-old son Claude (Zane Pais) are headed by train as the film opens. The two sisters have gone years without speaking, but Margot regally feels the impending ceremony is a reason to begin again.

That good feeling, however, doesn’t last very long. In fact, once she meets Malcolm, Pauline’s feckless and unemployed fiance (a rare semi-dramatic role for the gifted Jack Black), all positive intentions go up in smoke and ash. Though Margot has never had much sympathy for Pauline’s bohemian ways, she is convinced that the oafish Malcolm is the last person her sister should be marrying.

Margot, as it turns out, has strong opinions on anything you can think of and some things you can’t. A charismatic individual who is simultaneously highly toxic and unexpectedly vulnerable, she has a habit of saying the most savage things, reinventing herself from moment to moment and destroying people by speaking what she imagines is the truth.

It’s to be expected, then, that Margot dominates the relationship with Pauline, but there is more equality in it than you might guess. The sisters are close but it’s the kind of closeness that means they can’t agree on anything, can’t not pick at each other, really can’t stand each other underneath the intimacy.

One of the dark pleasures of “Margot” is watching Kidman and Leigh inhabit these two roles with a fierce passion. Kidman, always adventurous, is willing to show us Margot for what she is, while Leigh (who is married to Baumbach) makes the most of a rare opportunity to play a more vulnerable, sensitive character.

It is the nature of Margot’s aptitude for disturbing the peace that everyone who comes within her radius gets contaminated. She brings out the worst in people good and bad, especially Pauline’s unfriendly neighbors who are intent on cutting down a family heirloom tree. Included in this orbit are not only her son but also husband Jim (John Turturro), Pauline’s daughter from her first marriage (Flora Cross) and a writer Margot knows from New York (Ciaran Hinds).

Though “Margot at the Wedding” has its share of bleak humor, in many ways it is an easier film to admire than actually enjoy. But its saving grace is that, as envisioned by Baumbach and brought to life by Kidman, Margot is a character we can never completely dismiss or totally not care about. Something that’s said about one of her fictional creations -- “He’s a loathsome character but we also feel a strange sympathy for him” -- applies in full measure to the woman herself.

kenneth.turan@latimes.com

“Margot at the Wedding.” MPAA rating: R for sexual content and language. Running time: 1 hour, 33 minutes. In selected theaters.