billy wilder's THE SEVEN YEAR ITCH (1955)

todd field's LITTLE CHILDREN (2006)

it's been a long time since a movie affected me quite so much as Little Children, and days later i still can't put my finger on why; the film as a whole is dour, uncomfortable and a little overwrought, focusing sometimes lazily (though always eloquently) on the same bourgeoise malaise done to death by inferior but more accessible films like American Beauty. on the other hand, though, Field and Perotta's emotional and psychological incisions fearlessly graze bone throughout, whether presenting a sad man resigned to his monstrousness (Jackie Earle Haley's scene in the parked car will bother me for the rest of my life) or a pair of adulterers wrestling poignantly with the situation they so carelessly careened into hopelessness and hurt. in a lot of ways Little Children recalls the work of Todd Solondz: it's self-consciously shocking, and even occasionally blase in its deviant provocation. but Solondz snickers at his characters, and at the audience squirming in their seats; Field, on the other hand, maintains an austerity even in rare moments of levity, and while Little Children may be a hard film to sit through, we aren't ever left to question what it's made us feel.

noah baumbach's MARGOT AT THE WEDDING (2007)

lord, i’d hate to meet Noah Baumbach’s family. it’s possible, of course, that they’re perfectly lovely people, worlds removed from the walking psychological time bombs that populate his films, but that would make Baumbach the greatest screenwriter of his generation, an honor I’m not ready to bestow on the co-writer of The Life Aquatic. Margot At The Wedding, a worthy spiritual sequel to his excruciatingly perceptive commercial/psychiatric breakthrough The Squid And The Whale, again examines the dynamics of familial dysfunction, but on a far more bothersome level than the affected quirk typical of similar American indies; Baumbach’s voice as a filmmaker has by now clearly emerged through his ruthless examination of the thoughts and feelings we do our best to hide from the people we love, but slip out nonetheless.

where Squid centered on the emotional and intellectual angst of a teen facing his parents’ divorce, Margot At The Wedding focuses instead on the adult product of such psychological sabotage, a failed mother and wife who retreats to her own high horse on the eve of her estranged sister’s wedding. as character studies go, few in recent memory have been as penetrative as Nicole Kidman’s manipulative, desolate Margot, and Baumbach meets his performers halfway with a visual flatness that’s nearly as ugly as the emotions in play, but naturalistic in a way that serves the material. the overall result is less striking than The Squid And The Whale, but only because he seems to be striving to make his characters here as real as their feelings; that the film is unshowy makes it that much more subversive, and leaves us afraid of what Noah Baumbach might strip from our minds and hearts next time around.

(from the KNOXVILLE VOICE)