DVD of the Week: Margot at the Wedding

In his 2007 film, “Margot at the Wedding” (which I discuss in this clip), Noah Baumbach captures the shift in family dynamics that occurs when an outsider—a new spouse—joins in. To play the outsider, Baumbach recruited an actor who, in the company of the film’s female leads (Jennifer Jason Leigh, as the bride, and Nicole Kidman, as the sister of the bride), is a real outsider: Jack Black, whose major roles had been in such raucous comedies as “Nacho Libre,” “Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny,” and “The School of Rock.” The mere announcement of the casting, at the time of its release, set me in eager anticipation of a sort of cinematic polyphony by way of performance, and that’s just what Baumbach achieves. The clash of tones is carried through many registers; Baumbach tells a story with many strands of action and many characters, and the enduringly unresolved bond of the light-hearted and the pathetic, the romantic and the anguished, the tender and the brutal, the calculating and the guileless, makes for a complex experience—one that’s embodied by Baumbach’s sometimes confrontational and sometimes sidelong images. He took the strategic casting to the next level with his next film, “Greenberg,” starring Greta Gerwig alongside Ben Stiller, and he announces it with the early shot of Gerwig alone in a car, unfolding a mercurial range of mere being. It’s a cinematic shock with which the whole film vibrates.