Entertainment

HERE COMES THE CHIDE

I’VE had root canals that were more enjoyable than “Margot at the Wedding,” Noah Baumbach’s hugely pretentious, ugly and annoying follow-up to “The Squid and the Whale.”

I thought the earlier film was a tad overpraised, but it’s a masterpiece compared to “Margot,” a ham-fisted, faux French film peopled with the kind of self-absorbed literary neurotics you’d immediately flee from at a party.

Margot – overplayed by Nicole Kidman at her most actress-y – is a short-story writer who ruthlessly mines her own family for material (territory better covered by Woody Allen in “Deconstructing Harry”).

She arrives at her family’s desolate-looking East Coast compound for the wedding of her estranged sister, Pauline.

Accompanied by her mutely suffering, androgynous son (Zane Pais, apparently a stand-in for the director), Margot makes it clear to the pregnant and nearly as obnoxious Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh) that she disapproves of the bridegroom, a fat slacker named Malcolm (Jack Black).

The two sisters bicker incessantly and rehash their childhood – Margot sprinkled Pauline with paprika and shoved her into an oven when they were girls – and make fun of the working-class neighbors.

You can tell Kidman is the star because she gets to climb a tree – which Black subsequently cuts down onto the wedding tent – and cheats on her husband (John Turturro), who appears to be suffering even more than their son.

Poor Leigh (in real life, Baumbach’s wife) poops in her pants.

Like his sometimes collaborator Wes Anderson, Baumbach seems to be using his movies to endlessly work through his childhood traumas.

I’d be happier if they both found a good shrink and stopped subjecting us to navel-gazing bores like “The Darjeeling Limited” and “Margot at the Wedding.”

MARGOT AT THE WEDDING

Running time: 91 minutes. Rated R (profanity, sexuality). At the Lincoln Plaza and the Angelika.