NEW YORK—In a season of excellent films three concern family life, but from viewpoints that are miles apart. Margot at the Wedding, by filmmaker Noah Baumbach—remembered for his Academy Award-nominated The Squid and the Whale in 2005—shows an iffy relationship between two sisters, Margot (Nicole Kidman), an acid-tongued writer whose critical faculties are too much in evidence, as she takes a train trip with her pre-adolescent son Claude (Zane Pais) to attend her younger sister Pauline's (Jennifer Jason Leigh) wedding.
All does definitely not go well, given Margot's unfavorable take on Pauline's fiancée Malcom (Jack Black), an unemployed and somewhat boorish artist. Complications develop between Malcolm and a Lolita-esque neighbor, leading to unsettling turmoil between the sisters. Interspersed are incidents with nasty neighbors and an old flame of Margot's who lives nearby. In spite of the various degrees of friction the overall result is a warm and all too human comedy.
Master filmmaker Sidney Lumet's Before the Devil Knows You're Dead presents a clearly dysfunctional family, as older son Andy (Philip Seymour Hoffman) thinks nothing of pulling a robbery that will affect his own parents, dad Charles (Albert Finney) and Nanette (Rosemary Harris).
Andy has bills to pay and his sexy wife Gina (Marisa Tomei) needs things. Besides, the caper's consequences will be covered by the insurance money and nobody will suffer. Younger son/brother Hank (Ethan Hawke) grudgingly goes along with the plan.
However, the best laid plans oft go awry. They do, in this epic, in a very big way.
The 83-year-old Sidney Lumet, noted for major film classics and harking back to the old days of live television, remains at the top of his game. Noted as an "actor's director," he has elicited powerful and intense performances from the entire cast. All mentioned above are either Academy Award winners or nominees. Lumet himself was awarded an Honorary Academy Award in 2005 for his "brilliant services to performers, screenwriters, and the art of the motion picture."
The film is paced like firecrackers moving along a wire. The unexpected ending is sobering moral lesson.
Persepolis is about a family from Iran, more specifically the daughter of the family, Marjane Satrapi, who, along with Vincent Paronnaud, has created an animated adaptation of Satrapi's graphic novel. The film creates a vivid reality, as the viewer is pulled into Satrapi's life, suffering intimidation and degradation in her home country, experiencing the murder of close relatives, being forced to wear the veil, and more. She later moves to France to make a new life for herself, but it isn't always easy. As an added plus, the actors' voices include Chiara Mastroianni, Catherine Deneuve, and Danielle Darrieux.
The three films mentioned above will go into public release shortly.
A final Hong Kong entrant is the documentary Useless by Jia Zhangke, dealing with clothing factories as well as top-level designers selling in Paris, who are painfully aware of their expendable role in a world of mass-produced goods.
Diana Barth covers theatre and film for various publications.
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