Reading & Watching (November 2025)
Margot at the Wedding. I always get this confused with Rachel Getting Married, which I saw in theaters back in 2008. And it’s easy to confuse them — they’re both about weddings, they both involve family drama (and sister drama specifically), they both have redheads as the titular character (Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding, Rosemarie Dewitt in Rachel Getting Married), and they’re both about difficult people who reappear to try to make some kind of amends with their estranged family. If I recall, amends sort of happen in Rachel Getting Married. Less so in Margot at the Wedding.
Now, for something very shallow: I have never really been a Nicole Kidman person. I do not mean that I have ever disliked her; I have always generally admired her work. She’s just not at all my type. But apparently, all that was required to change that for me was for her to have dark red hair, be a neurotic, cerebral short story writer who is a complete nightmare to deal with, and I’m like “I COULD FIX HER.” (I very much could not.) When she first appeared on screen, I was like “God, she’s such a baby here.” (The movie was released in 2007, when she was 40 years old.) Margot is mean, she’s self-destructive, she causes all sorts of drama wherever she goes, and I *love* her. I would unquestionably put up with so much shit from her and let her make my life completely miserable, just like her onscreen husband, played by Jon Turturro. At one point, he pulls over to help a woman whose dog has been hit by a car, and, later, once the dog is safely at the vet, Margot is like “I HATE HOW NICE YOU ARE.” He gives her a thoughtful gift, and she’s awful about it! At the time of the film’s release, Kidman said this about the character:
“I hope you see that the spikiness and the guardedness and the anger is actually a manifestation of her need to protect herself. She’s not in a safe place, really, because her sister doesn’t know how to take care of her, and she doesn’t know how to take care of her sister...They feel like they should be very, very close, but they actually do not bring out the best in each other.”
And I do see, Nicole. I do. You conveyed it very skillfully. I could not fix her, but I am not confused about what is wrong. I appreciate how guileless Margot is about her dysfunction. Like, she is not hiding it behind a confident, open facade. You can reliably predict exactly what Margot is going to do, even if said thing is extremely self-defeating or misguided. Classic Margot!
There’s a scene where Ciaran Hinds, as her lover-cum-collaborator with the improbable name of Dick Koozman, completely humiliates her in an interview at a local bookstore, and I was ready to murder that guy, which is saying a lot given he played Captain Wentworth in the very-faithful-to-the-source-material 1995 film adaptation of Persuasion, and thus has a lot of goodwill from me. She’s extremely difficult, but HOW DARE YOU.
As a movie, it feels like pretty classic Noah Baumbach fare, in the sense that it’s full of unpleasant people acting like children. The only people with any maturity, in fact, are the children. (Another Baumbach trademark.) Throughout, I was like “Wow, why would you do that. That isn’t helpful.” Margot is kind of a bitch about her sister Pauline’s fiance, Malcolm, played by Jack Black, but she’s also 100% correct. He is a childish loser!
It’s only 90 minutes, or I might have struggled because these people are incredibly annoying.
Nashville (1975). The Portland Museum of Art is doing this Fall of ‘75 series, screening movies from, you guessed it, 1975. I hadn’t heard of it until a few weeks ago, so I can’t say what movies preceded Nashville, but One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest is happening Thanksgiving week.
I actually had to do a Google search for “Robert Altman filmography” because I had spaced on his other movies, some of which I have actually seen. I was like, “Well, there’s M*A*S*H. And The Player. And and that other one with a big cast and a lot of overlapping storylines.” (I was thinking of Short Cuts, based on a bunch of Raymond Carver stories, that I probably watched alone at age 12 on HBO while staying at my Dad’s for the weekend. I mostly remember Lyle Lovett as the really mean baker.) I got interested in movies just as Altman was arguably starting to decline — the first of his movies that I remember being released in theaters was his follow-up to Short Cuts, the universally panned Pret-a-Porter, released as Ready to Wear in the US. I definitely thought he was still alive (he died in 2006), but that’s because I was confusing him with Francis Ford Coppola. (“Yeah, he did that big movie last year or something.”) I will also always love Cookie’s Fortune, which has an amazing cast.
Nashville is in line with The Player and Ready to Wear in its large, ensemble cast, overlapping storylines, and satirical eye towards a creative industry that wields enormous cultural power. In The Player, it was Hollywood, in Ready to Wear, it was Paris Fashion Week, and in Nashville, it’s the country music capital of the world. It’s been a long time since I saw either of those other two movies, but I recall them being shot in a slightly more conventional way — particularly Ready to Wear. In Nashville, I feel there’s this very useful tension between the disposition of the film — toward its characters and their milieu, an industry known for both its glittering artifice and supposedly homespun authenticity — and often naturalistic, even documentarian style of the cinematography. That naturalism is undercut by a persistent sense of the absurd, embodied most clearly in Jeff Goldblum’s magician (who literally just does magic and occasionally gives people a ride) and Shelley Duvall’s Martha, who is in town from California to visit her ailing aunt, but mostly just drifts through different scenes and settings wearing a seemingly endless series of tiny outfits and elaborate wigs. In one early scene, a couch unexpectedly falls onto a highway (where most of the main characters happen to be driving) causing a multiple-car accident, with the cars swerving and spinning perfectly into spaces seemingly allotted to them, like pieces in a Tetris game. Everything is both extremely loose and very tightly constructed.
The plot centers on the long-awaited return of beloved singer Barbara Jean (Ronee Blakely) following an extended recovery in a distant hospital for what today would be called a traumatic brain injury. It’s clear very early on that Barbara Jean is not ready to return to performing, as she collapses shortly after her arrival at the airport and spends the bulk of the film in a hospital bed until circumstances (and her shitty husband) force her back onto the stage. At the same time, the city is preparing for a rally for an insurgent third-party political candidate, Hal Phillip Walker, who is never seen, but whose campaign van roams the city blaring slogans from its loudspeaker. A visiting reporter from the BBC trails after a stable of industry regulars, including Henry Watson as be-sequined elder statesman Haven Hamilton, Lily Tomlin as a white gospel singer with two deaf children, and Keith Carradine as one third of a folk trio known as Tom, Mary, and Bill.
Throughout there is a very fraught relationship between the signifier (the American flag, in particular) and the signified (democracy, freedom, authenticity) as well as this strong undercurrent of dread, dissatisfaction, and violence. Opal, the BBC reporter, at one point tells another character:
I have a theory about political assassination. You see, I believe that people like Madame Pearl and all these people here, in this country, who carry guns, are the real assassins. Because, you see, they stimulate other people who, are perhaps innocent, and who eventually are the ones who pull the trigger.
The assassin in Nashville is, indeed, a non-entity with obscure motives, though I’d never call him innocent. He seems to act for no reason at all, or simply because he is seeking meaning through violence. Released in the year between Watergate and the Bicentennial, and not far removed from the chaos that destroyed the dreams of the 1960s, Nashville depicts an America that has lost faith in the ideas and institutions that once provided meaning and pride but that nonetheless clings to its symbols and empty pageantry.
Signpost to Murder (1964) and Seduced and Abandoned (1964)
I saw these both through local organization Kinonik, which screens classic films on 16mm. Signpost to Murder was chosen because it was filmed in Britain just before the development of CinemaScope, and because the camera and an — I think this is the word — anamorphic lens had to be focused separately, it led to…not a lot of camera movement. It’s an enjoyable film, about a man, Alex, committed to an asylum following the murder of his wife (supposedly by him, but the details don’t really support it) who escapes in order to trigger an little-known exemption from a Victorian-era law that would grant him a new sanity trial. He ends up taking refuge in a house in a nearby village, occupied by a woman played by Joanne Woodward. Sparks fly, intrigues occur, and somebody ends up sucked up into the mill wheel that the entire house is built around, which is not exactly what you expect from a film from 1964. It features a guy named Edward Mulhere as the psychologist who has befriended Alex (or HAS HE?) and he’s familiar both for his actual work (extensive in film and TV for decades) and also for his strong resemblance (as much in vibes as in visage) to other British actors of the time, like Rex Harrison (for whom he was the understudy during the London production of My Fair Lady) and Christopher Plummer.
Seduced and Abandoned is an Italian farce from director Pietro Germi, who rose to prominence with Divorce, Italian Style in 1961. It skewers southern Italy, namely Sicily, and a particular law that decreed that a man accused of assault, corruption of a minor, indecency, etc., could have those charges dropped and the crimes completely annulled if he married the woman in question. The story follows 15-year-old Agnese, who is seduced — borderline assaulted — by her sister’s fiance, Peppino, and becomes pregnant. The film recounts her father’s frantic and cunning efforts to force Peppino to marry her and maintain the family honor. It has its moments, it moves along at an andante pace, but I feel its era has probably passed. As the film raced towards its (somewhat overdue) conclusion, I felt more irritation and anger than laughter. If you are at all invested in women’s autonomy, and see the female characters (admittedly barely developed) as real people, it’s difficult to find any of this funny. Poor Agnese spends most of the film being literally chased, slapped, and generally degraded. There is a very funny scene, however, where the father and a lawyer uncle discuss the possible ways they might kill Peppino and get away with it under Italian law.
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I was a fan of The X-Files as a teen and there is an episode in the first season — “Beyond the Sea” — and I watched some behind-the-scenes show where they mentioned that the serial killer in the episode is played by Brad Dourif and that Brad Dourif “costs a little extra.” I was like, “Who is Brad Dourif? Why is he expensive?” and since this was in a very different, barely existent era of the Internet, I could not easily determine who Brad Dourif was. This question, of Brad Dourif’s overall significance as an actor, has remained in the back of my mind since then. Early in the film, when Billy Bibbit first appears, I was like, “Huh, I think that’s maybe Brad Dourif, the guy who played the serial killer in that one episode of The X-Files.” And, lo and behold, in the closing credits, there it was… “And introducing Brad Dourif as Billy Bibbit.” Can’t say I have anything interesting to say about this movie. Obviously, there is the banal evil of Nurse Ratched and the administrators (and I mean banal because at times, you’re like, she has a point!), and also the way the patients themselves — including McMurphy — let themselves be shut away. Many of them are voluntary admits who could leave at any time. McMurphy cannot, but he also fails to take his one chance (in the final sequence, he is literally found sleeping beneath an open window) or to play along enough to get sent back to the work farm from which he would eventually be released. He lets Ratched and the administrators “work on him,” as “Chief” Bromden (Will Sampson) warns, and fails to appreciate — much like the film overall — the delicate mental state of some of his fellow patients, most notably Billy. (Briefly, in thinking of some modern-day equivalent of the asylum — where you are babied and spoonfed and denied autonomy but get to hang out with your boys — I was like, “it’s the ALGORITHM.” Not sure that argument could hold up to scrutiny, though. But, yeah, many of us don’t want to leave these walled gardens full of toxic weeds because our friends are there and they can’t come with us.