Had the opportunity to catch "Margot at the Wedding" last night at Keystone Art Cinema.

I've been a big fan of writer/director (and Wes Anderson collaborator) Noah Baumbach since the mid-90's when he came out with "Kicking and Screaming" -- which is a brilliant film about the paralysis that vexes modern college graduates, not a film about soccer starring Will Ferrell.

I even liked Baumbach's somewhat uninspired follow-up, "Mr. Jealousy", a romantic comedy starring Eric Stoltz. (For those of you that haven't seen "Mr. Jealousy", it is to Baumbach what "Jersey Girl" is to Kevin Smith.)

Then came "The Squid and the Whale", a very difficult film. None of the characters are likable and juvenile masturbation is a major theme. There was a lot of honesty in the work -- which has been one of Baumbach's strengths, along with his Woody Allen-meets-Quentin Tarintino ear for (sometimes overly) witty dialogue. But in "Whale" -- and I suddenly feel like I'm NPR reviewer David Edelstein saying this -- Baumbach's honesty took on such a stark edge that it was almost disturbing.

Now he's back with "Margot at the Wedding". Armed with the cache from the almost universal critical acclaim for "Whale" -- not to mention the rub of providing dialogue for Wes Anderson's better films -- Baumbach is able to assemble some big names for what is essentially a very small picture: Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh ... and Jack Black?

Yes, Nacho Libre himself is back in a surprisingly toned-down performance that only goes over the top once. His best performance is still as Barry in "High Fidelity", but he does an admirable job here and he's well-casted. Leigh is also strong and brings plenty of gravity to her role, but the real star -- in every sense of the word -- is Kidman, who completely sheds her glamorous image to deliver a starkly honest portrait of a complicated and real adult woman.

In what seems like an echo of "Whale", we're invited to view this character through the eyes of her distant and almost impregnable male child. And, as in "Whale", masturbation plays an uncomfortably central role.

But the most powerful echo of "Whale" is a scene in which Kidman's Margot, who is a modestly successful novelist, answers a question about how autobiographical her work is, given its "naked honesty." Margot dodges the question by saying that it's just a story, that the characters not inspired by real people -- ironically, the same defense Jason Swartzman's possibly Baumbach-inspired character makes about his clearly autobiographical short stories in Wes Anderson's "The Darjeeling Limited".

But no sooner has she dodged the question then she is nakedly exposed by a mean-spirited observation from a friend that Margot's unlikable, domineering characters seem not to be a reflection of other people, but of herself.

4.5 out of 5