Margot at the Wedding

Margot and Pauline, two of four siblings, have been estranged for years, largely because of their fundamental differences. Margot, a successful Manhattan-based writer, is judgmental yet neurotic. She believes anyone stupid is clinically retarded or autistic. She has written about their family, including Pauline and their abusive father, as therapy, although she does not admit publicly that her stories are autobiographical. Pauline, a divorced college professor with a preteen daughter named Ingrid, is a free spirit who largely goes where life takes her, which is nowhere. Despite that estrangement, Pauline invites Margot and her family to her wedding at Margot and Pauline's childhood Long Island home where Pauline now lives with her fiance, Malcolm. Margot, in turn, accepts, also despite she not approving of Malcolm either on principle or on first sight, he who dabbles in many different areas, none of which earns him any money. Margot and her preteen son Claude arrive a few days in advance of the wedding, while the rest of their family, including Margot's husband Jim, plan to arrive the day of. Margot's unyielding ways have had a negative affect on Claude, although he needs the emotional connection to his mother. Pauline learns that while in the area Margot plans on doing some work, she who is collaborating on a screenplay with local writer, Dick Koosman, whose twenty year old daughter Maisie is friends with Pauline and Malcolm. As such, Pauline can't help feel that Margot accepted the wedding invitation solely because of that work. Margot and Pauline feel the need to be close to each other emotionally, which manifests itself in each telling the other issues about their personal life which they have not divulged to anyone else. These revelations and what they do with the information may either bring them closer together or tear them apart even further as those revelations also affect their relationships with others in the same way.