From its Eric Rohmer-inspired title, to its poster’s mid to late 70s art-directed aesthetic—with Nicole Kidman in profile, and that bright floppy hat a further giveaway—you could be forgiven for thinking you’d already seen Margot at the Wedding. I know that’s how I felt prior to seeing the film at the NYFF in 2007. I fully expected that there was going to be bookish talk by bookish people, and that the camera was going to be as skittish as Margot and her dysfunctional family. Up on the screen it was going to look like life, while never letting you forget that you were watching a movie, with its abrupt and startling cuts which spoke of a filmmaker very much attuned to the romance of making a certain kind of film. All at once it was going to look natural and airy, yet also muted, as though all of the colours had been drained in advance so that Noah Baumbach would never have to worry about his film becoming dated. (It’s like longing to make a dirty-sounding record in an era of clean technology.) In other words, Baumbach (along with Harris Savides) dated the movie himself. He did something similar with Greenberg. The mores and manners belong to contemporary times, but the atmosphere evoked is of an earlier period of American film-making.
—MM
Running From The Reels 