Quvenzhané Wallis gives her director Behn Zeitlin a big hug.

The red carpet was aglow with the incandescent twinkle of Hollywood’s stars on Monday night at the 22nd annual Independent Film Project Gotham Awards. With Oscar winners Matt Damon and Marion Cotillard amongst the evening’s honorees and the likes of Jack Black, Amy Adams, Emily Blunt, John Krasinski and so many more blazing a trail through the double doors of Wall St.’s Cipriani’s, it was no wonder that the less glamorous side of the velvet rope was a veritable press feeding frenzy. Lucky for us, then, that we had sharpened our claws.

As the guests took their seats for the ceremony, The Observer was whisked upstairs to a private viewing room, lest we cavort too rambunctiously with the delicate A-List crowd. There we watched over the evening’s events like demi-gods looking down from the heavens upon the cherubs pecking away at their meals, with eight year old nominee Quvenzhané Williams and 13 year old Jared Gilman leading the underage coterie.

The awards soon got underway, much to the delight of the recipients. Honoring their intentions as champions of independent cinema, the jury not only rewarded the biggest Hollywood names but the industry’s up-and-comers for their contribution to film. Beasts of the Southern Wild writer and director Benh Zeitlin was undoubtedly the big winner of the night, scooping statuettes – well, glass cuboids - for Breakthrough Director alongside the Bingham Ray Award, dedicated to the late film executive.

Mr. Zeitlin was so swept up with his first victory, however, that he scarcely noticed he had procured a second, pausing in his role as the obliging interviewee only to dash back downstairs to claim his newest prize.

“The fact that the film has gotten out into the world has been overwhelming,” he told The Observer, “And I never imagined this many people would not only see it but champion it, and make it their business to help the film get out there. It has completely changed my life.” A spate of critical successes at Cannes, Sundance, the LA Film Festival and the International Film Festival has seen Louisiana-based Mr. Zeitlin’s awards cabinet go from empty to engorged in a matter of months.

Another director honored for his work during the event was David O. Russell, whose work on the likes of The Fighter and new release Silver Linings Playbook secured his status as a deserving IFP Gotham Award recipient. "With an independent film you are with your little family and you work together all day every day, and that’s the real difference," he explained. "You’re all there for the passion, and I prefer that because projects have to come from the heart. You have to dig deep."

Academy Award-winners and Gotham honorees Mr. Damon and Ms. Cotillard are certainly no strangers to widespread acclaim, but both seemed similarly touched by their newest prestigious accolade. Ms. Cotillard was every inch the elegant belle of the ball, dazzling in an array of Chopard jewelry and a stunning Christian Dior couture gown.

Clearly her nationality influences not only her wardrobe but her passion for various projects, telling The Observer: “I really cherish the fact that I’m able to share my French movies worldwide, because we have amazing creativity in France.” The softly spoken actress, who stars in the recently released Rust and Bone, seemed quite overcome with emotion, before continuing: “With this film I had one of the greatest journeys ever, and to share this very unconventional love story outside of my country is something that I enjoy more than anything. I never choose a movie because of whether it’s independent or not, it’s just a story that’s got to take me. But independent movies have the freedom of telling stories that nobody except a special director would tell.”

Mr. Damon echoed the Parisian sweetheart’s sentiments, divulging, “I’ve never set goals for my career. Each movie is just story-telling, and I never wanted to not do a bunch of good movies because I was waiting to make a great one.”

The evening was particularly poignant for the actor, who recalled his first attendance at the Gotham Awards some 15 years earlier in the year Good Will Hunting was released. The best-buddy-Ben-Affleck spot was filled not by his usual partner in crime, but by Mr. Krasinski, who became fast friends with the honoree after meeting on the set of The Adjustment Bureau, in which Mr. Damon and Mr. Krasinski’s wife Ms. Blunt, starred. The Observer did contemplate asking whether Mr. Damon’s onscreen dalliance with his friend’s spouse ever induced some awkward glances around the dinner table, but we opted to forgo stirring the salacious pot on this occasion.

Back to the matter at hand, Mr. Damon said he enjoyed the ubiquitous montage of his roles over the years, but revealed, “It’s always a little cringe inducing – if you have a bad or mediocre day at work, it’s alive forever, so that part [of working in film] is always a little weird.”

But Mr. Damon, who plays the lead in upcoming indie flick Promised Land, needn’t worry about bad days at the office, given that his most recent prize was for Lifetime Achievement – at the grand old age of 42. “I hope this is like a buoy marker – a half time thing,” he laughed. “I want to do this for another 50 years!”

And with that, our time with Mr. Damon was up, and he was briskly shepherded to the after party with the rest of his showbiz pals. Alas, we did not get the opportunity to put on our dancing shoes and join in the film festivities, but the evening was quite the show itself.

Black and MacLaine.

One of the many delights of Bernie, the offbeat new comedy by Richard Linklater, is that it is fresh, surprising and funny without going for sitcom punch lines or ridiculous, contrived situations inserted for guffaws. It’s not hilarious. It’s just warm and real enough to keep you smiling and awed at the same time. It is also the only movie I have ever liked Jack Black in, one of the few times Matthew McConaughey, a terrible actor, has ever come anywhere close to giving a tolerable performance, and features Shirley MacLaine’s best role in years. A lot to like here, and I liked it all.

Bernie, based on a Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth called “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas,” is the eccentric true crime story of a 1997 murder in Carthage, Texas, in which 81-year-old Marjorie Nugent, the richest, meanest and most hated woman in East Texas, was found stuffed in the bottom of her freezer, hammered to death by her lover, best friend and devoted heir, a porky mortician named Bernie Tiede. It was a headline-making scandal, but the friends and neighbors of the beloved Bernie rallied to his defense and turned him into a hero. This is the story, told in a mock documentary style that derives most of its humor from interviews with actual citizens of Carthage who showered Bernie with support and rallied no sympathy for his murder victim. It is quite a story, and an unusual movie more merry than morbid.

From his arrival in Carthage, Bernie was a hands-on, give-it-all-you-got kind of guy, tending his corpses at the local funeral parlor with loving care—shaving facial hair from their nostrils, inserting super glue on their eyelids to avoid embarrassing last-minute surprises in the coffin, even filling their mouths with rubber balls to prevent drooping jaws in open-casket viewings. Bernie won kudos for his tender talent for body removal and his artistry for embalming and cosmetology. With no experience, he was a fast learner and in no time became an expert on car wrecks, heart attacks and household poisons, making his clients feel special. Business boomed and everyone went to Bernie. Then he met his match in a monstrous old trout named Marjorie Nugent.

When her husband, a Texas oil man named Bubba, passed on, “Miss Margie” went through the motions of a funeral like everyone else, hating everything and every mourner, cutting her relatives out of the will, and living up to the town’s assessment of her as a “mean old hateful bitch.” When we first see Shirley MacLaine, scowling with venom, her face screwed into wrinkled ridges of sour dough, her eyes slits of reptilian fury reducing everything in sight to ashes, she looks like a pterodactyl. But Bernie was determined to win her over. Considering it part of his job to visit widows after their husband’s memorials, he delivered gifts to her gated manse only to get the door slammed in his face. But eventually she started to thaw when he took her to events like the Van Cliburn piano competitions in Fort Worth. (This is Texas. Expectations do not run high. You do what you can to hold on to your sanity.) Soft as dough, fastidious to a fault, smelling of cologne and more than a wee bit androgynous, Bernie even sang show tunes in local stage shows and collected men’s fitness magazines. Was he gay? Small-town rumors dominated front porch gossip, but Miss Margie didn’t care. She had found a devoted new slave, appointed him her business manager, and even took him on vacation trips, platonically sharing the same bedroom. Her appalled relatives grew more aghast when she left her entire estate to Bernie in exchange for pedicures, makeup applications and Lysoling her kitchen counters. Whenever he got out of line, she would chew her food 20 times, noisily and annoyingly, to drive him to distraction. But as Bernie grew more disillusioned with his meal ticket, the citizens of Carthage cemented their affection for Bernie as he bought them gifts, offered financial advice and paid for a new prayer wing at the Methodist church. Growing more jealous by the day, Miss Margie turned possessive and so unbearable that convenient garden tools became irresistible. But Mr. Linklater’s talent for drawing out the most intimate, unedited and inadvertently charming responses from people in coffee shops and wicker rocking chairs turns even tragedy into chuckles of joy.

Jack Black displays an unctuous, mustachioed sweetness punctuated by a welcome restraint he’s never shown before. (He even sings “Love Lifted Me.”) It can’t be easy for the great Shirley MacLaine to find juicy roles at this time and place in movie history, but she is both fearless and miraculous in her total concentration on playing a human dragon. Age and the weather have robbed her of nothing in the way of comic timing and technique. The events in Bernie are tied together by interviews with corny down-home locals who, without knowing it, could easily do skits on Saturday Night Live. When Bernie goes to trial, the State of Texas even moves to change the location because the defendant is so popular the prosecutors fear they can’t get a conviction. The only person who seeks justice (for highly suspicious personal reasons) is the district attorney who acts like a sheriff, Danny Buck Davidson, played by Matthew McConaughey with his usual tongue-swallowing drawl but more charisma than usual. Even his questionable dedication to law and order has limits; the town turns the trial into a picnic, selling pimento cheese sandwiches on the courthouse lawn.

It’s a delectable slice of Southern Gothic humor, a side show of rednecks and Bubbas and Aunt Tooties—probably actors, but so convincing they seem like real people playing themselves. But it’s all true, and so is the dialogue. Mr. Linklater has always demonstrated a keen ear for what people say and his direction, of both pros and amateurs, has compassion and insight for details. Actual newspaper clippings act as visual guides, illustrating the mayhem. Even in prison, Bernie’s indefatigable adventures continue. Would you believe he now gives cooking lessons to the other inmates and conducts Bible studies behind bars while his friends await his return to Carthage? This is all public record, and the story is far from over. I, for one, eagerly await the sequel to Bernie.

rreed@observer.com

BERNIE

Running Time 104 minutes

Written by Richard Linklater and Skip Hollandsworth

Directed by Richard Linklater

Starring Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey

3.5/4

Wilson, Black and Martin.

The Big Year is arguably the best movie ever made about … bird watching? Yes, you heard me right. Now there’s a subject that should have them lined up around the block, fighting to get in. Maybe I’m wrong. A lot of people pay dues to join the Audubon Society. I am not one of them.

So we have this movie, see, directed by David Frankel, who directed The Devil Wears Prada, so you have a right to expect something special. Oh, Mona, how to break the news gently. It’s not so much awful as, well, not there at all. I mean, it disappears faster than a yellow-chested finch whose bird feeder has been invaded by raccoons. Anyway, it’s about three grown men who never reached maturity, chasing their dream. They call themselves “birders” and their dream happens to be searching for birds through binoculars from tree limbs, mountain tops, boat ferries … you name it; if it’s got feathers, they’re watching it. They are Stu (Steve Martin), a high-powered businessman CEO with money, fame and an understanding wife, who is willing to throw away everything he spent his life working for to watch birds; Kenny (Owen Wilson), an arrogant, selfish S.O.B. with no responsibilities and no loyalty to anybody, who even leaves his beautiful wife in the middle of sex to watch a bird migration over Houston, Texas; and Brad (Jack Black), a porcine loser who doesn’t leave anybody or anything behind because he hasn’t got a girl or a job in the first place. Birders who walk away from their lives and families to devote 12 months to birding become part of a competition called “The Big Year.” The object is to see who can spot and identify the highest number of bird species in North America. No prize, no reward, no money at the end—just the pleasure of photographing a red-tailed hawk before anybody else does. Kenny is the reigning champion who lies, cheats and double-crosses his friendly rivals to hold his title while the others struggle to keep up with him. The entire movie is about how they destroy marriages, walk out on business mergers and spend their savings on airfares.

In a Brownsville garbage dump, Stu spots a vulture. Kenny compares birding with Mozart’s composing. One lady birder is attacked by a mob of birds because her scarf from Bergdorf’s was used to wipe up bird bait. (“Hitchcockian,” drawls Owen Wilson in a voice as boiled as an owl.) It all drags on endlessly, in the same paralyzed pace. See the ink-footed goose in Boston. Catch that flamingo in the Everglades. From Des Moines to Yosemite National Park to Galveston while the guys hop into boats, helicopters and rented cars. In the middle of setting up an oxygen tank for his father after the old man suffers a heart attack, Brad even drops everything and heads for the airport to see something with a beak. O.K., so they follow their dream, but you don’t like any of these jerks while they’re doing it, and you don’t learn anything new when it’s over.

You do see a lot of gnatcatchers, plovers, terns, grosbeaks, titmice, teals, scamps, yellow throats, sapsuckers, egrets, gulls, woodpeckers and dippers while the sound track plays a song called “I Like Birds.” I found them immensely more appealing than the people who were chasing them. Steve Martin has isolated moments trying in vain to choke some humor out of a film that is only slightly less amusing than a case of bird fever, but he’s got his work cut out for him sharing the screen with Jack Black and Owen Wilson, two of the screen’s most annoying unsolved mysteries. Woody Allen knew exactly what to do with Mr. Wilson’s flaws, capitalizing on his broken nose and an irritating voice that forms exaggerated vowels that stay lodged in his sinus cavities. Jimmy Stewart had an annoying voice too, but he could act. I’m not sure anyone knows what to do with Jack Black. If they do, it’s a carefully guarded secret.

I wish all the agony in The Big Year was leading up to something fascinating in the end, but the most inviting thing in the movie was the exit door.

rreed@observer.com

THE BIG YEAR

Running Time 90 minutes

Written by Howard Franklin

Directed by David Frankel

Starring Owen Wilson, Jack Black and Steve Martin

2/4

Welcome back, Sandra Bullock! The Proposal accepted $34.1 million in ticket sales, giving America’s Sweetheart the No. 1 movie at the box office, and simultaneously knocking The Hangover into second place. The celebration wasn’t as joyous for Year One though, as the prehistoric comedy landed in a disappointing fourth with a pedestrian $20.2 million. As we do each Monday, here’s a breakdown of the top five at the box office.

1. The Proposal: $34.1 million ($34.1 million total)

File this under: If you build it, they will come. The Proposal is the first star-driven romantic comedy to hit theaters since Ghosts of Girlfriends Past on May 1 and it clearly filled a major void in the summer marketplace; 71 percent of the audience classified themselves as “couples.” For Ms. Bullock, in addition to being the biggest opening of her career, The Proposal marks the first time she’s seen one of her films top the box office since Forces of Nature turned the trick in the spring of 1999. At a time when A-list stars are watching their films fall by the wayside, watch Sandy rising! Now the mysterious  All About Steve, co-starring the now A-listed Bradley Cooper and reshuffled till September,  looks like a potential winner.

2. The Hangover: $26.8 million ($152.9 million total)

Somebody call 911. The Hangover continued its fire-burning run, dropping a laughably low 19 percent over the weekend, en route to bringing its total to nearly $153 million. Forget just passing Wedding Crashers as the highest grossing R-rated comedy of all time; Todd Phillips’ smash could wind up as the third-highest-grossing R-rated movie ever, behind only Matrix Reloaded and The Passion of the Christ. Not bad for a “sleeper hit,” eh?

3. Up: $21.3 million ($224.1 million total)

By shedding only 31 percent of its audience from week-to-week, Up continued its rise on the Pixar charts, passing Wall*E to land in seventh place all-time for the studio. With $224.1 million to date, Up will easily glide by Cars, Toy Story 2 and Monsters, Inc. in the coming week and it should still cross the $300 million barrier before all is said and done. And to think, the Wall Street types were worried about this film just two months ago.

4. Year One: $20.2 million ($20.2 million total)

Easily one of the worst movies of the year, Year One barely topped the opening of Land of the Lost to wind up in fourth place over the weekend. Since Year One cost about half as much as Will Ferrell’s bomb, the losses won’t be as severe, but, with word of mouth sure to be poisonous, don’t expect final grosses much more than double this opening haul. If this is the best Harold Ramis can come up with, we weep for Ghostbusters 3.

5. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3: $11.3 million ($43.3 million total)

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 plunged 51 percent from last week, but still managed to hold off the fifth frame of Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian ($7.3 million/$155.9 million total) to land in fifth place. We’re not saying that level of attrition isn’t disappointing, but with everyone touting Pelham as a failure, we must again note that a final tally of around $70 million will be right in line with the average grosses of Denzel Washington ($70.7 million) and John Travolta ($62 million) since 2000. What did everyone expect here? Sometimes the reality trumps perception.

Since the weekend's weather forecast is looking all The Day After Tomorrow-y, you'd be forgiven for not realizing that Sunday marks the official start of summer. (It’s also Father’s Day; go buy a card already!) Three movies hit theaters today all bent on making you laugh. As we do every Friday, here’s a handy guide to the new releases.

The Proposal

What’s the story: Lost in this summer movie season of Vulcan’s, Terminator’s and Zack Galifianakis is the fact that it’s June 19th and not a single romantic comedy has been released. (Like the ticket buyers, we’ll pretend that Ghosts of Girlfriends Past and My Life in Ruins don’t exist.) Thank goodness, then, for Sandra Bullock! America’s Almost Sweetheart (we still love Julia more) returns to her genre of choice in The Proposal. The cutesy-looking rom-com finds Ms. Bullock playing a successful Canadian executive living in the U.S. illegally and facing deportation back to her home country unless she can marry an American. Enter Ryan Reynolds as her younger and very put-upon assistant. The Proposal has gotten some solid reviews and we’re always interested in seeing what Ms. Bullock is up to, but the most interesting part of this film happens to be the back story: With Hollywood in love with female screenwriters (The Fempire!), writer Peter Chiarelli pretended he was actually a woman named Jennifer Kirby to get the film noticed by studios. Michael Dorsey would certainly be proud.

Who should see it: Lou Dobbs.

Year One

What’s the story: Call it Judd Apatow’s Life of Brian. Jack Black and Michael Cera star as two lazy hunter-gatherers banned from their prehistoric village and left to wander the earth in search of the meaning of life, only stopping to make the occasional dick joke. Since this is a Judd Apatow production (Harold Ramis directs), expect to see the familiar faces of Paul Rudd, Bill Hader and McLovin’. All that sounds well and good, but don’t get your hopes up: The reviews have been of the scorched-earth variety. It might be best to see The Hangover for a third time this weekend instead.

Who should see it: John Cleese.

Whatever Works

What’s the story: As consistent as the change of seasons, here comes the yearly Woody Allen film. And for the first time since Melinda and Melinda in 2004, he’s moved the milieu back to New York. (Hooray!) Whatever Works is based on a script Mr. Allen wrote all the way back in his Annie Hall days, and, at the time, he had intended for Zero Mostel to star. Now, some 30 years later, it’s Larry David who gets the honors, playing Boris, a middle-aged misanthrope brought back from the brink by a young pixie in the form of Evan Rachel Wood. The reviews for Whatever Works have been mixed—our Rex Reed calls the film a “zit” on the face of Woody’s canon—but we’re still holding out hope this winds up being a keeper.

Who should see it: Laurie David.

The untitled film centers on Mr. Black's character, who washes up on the shores of Cuba with no memory on how he got there. After some deliberation he assumes he must be a superspy. Presumably, comedy ensues.

We're sorry for being so negative. We really like Mr. Black! School of Rock was adorable! He was the best part of migraine-inducing Margot at the Wedding! He even got laughs in Tropic Thunder, though admittedly he was maybe the fourth or fifth funniest person in that film. But this just sounds like the hackiest hack idea in the history of hacks. Seriously. Don't believe us? Look at some of the "hilarious" quotes from co-writer Jonathan Aibel: "For our next live-action project, we knew we wanted to work with either a panda or Jack ... We also figured that if we could write for Jack as a panda, we could write for him as a human."

With zingers like that, Mr. Aibel and his partner Glenn Berger are sure to have a long career writing Scary Movie spin-offs. But before that happens, they'll slay us with this film. Look for it in theaters sometime before the apocalypse.

With a $41,000 per-theater average in Manhattan, Point was the only movie to average over $20,000. (In a standard week, there are at least three movies that manage this feat—last week, there were five.) Be Kind Rewind (no. 3) came surprisingly close ($18,870), despite mixed reviews. With the draw of Jack Black, New Line—and maybe even Mr. Black himself, who must be wondering if his own popularity is waning—probably had higher hopes for the comedy. Historically speaking, however, it never had a chance.

Robert Downey, Jr., who used to be able to do no wrong—including ingesting copious amounts of booze and drugs—might be thinking along the lines of Mr. Black after his film, Charlie Bartlett (no. 10), bombed. It averaged a pitiful $7,500 on eight screens. But like Mr. Downey after a decent bender, audiences will emerge from this moribund movie-going period having forgotten all of the movies released in February to die. Sayonara, Bartlett! May we never speak of you again.

And while it may be a foregone conclusion that Witless Protection, a comedy starring Larry the Cable Guy of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour and the catch phrase “git-r-done,” wouldn’t do well here in the city, the same, sadly, can’t be said for the rest of county. But lo and behold, it did just as poorly everywhere else, as it did here, failing to crack either top ten. Maybe Barack Obama’s right and there is hope for us after all.

List of theaters: Paris, Zeigfeld, Oprheum, East 85th St., 86th St. East, 84th St., Lincoln Plaza, 62nd and Broadway, Lincoln Square, Magic Johnson, 72nd St East, Cinemas 1, 2 &3rd Ave, 64th and 2nd , Imaginasian, Manhattan Twin, First and 62nd St., Angelika Film Center, Quad, IFC Center, Film Forum, Village East, Village Seven, Cinema Village, Union Square, Essex, Battery Park 11, Sunshine, 34th Street, Empire, E-Walk, Chelsea, 19th Street East, and Kips Bay.

Manhattan Weekend Box Office: How moviegoers in the multiplexes of middle America choose to spend their ten-spot is probably a big deal in Hollywood. But here in Manhattan, the hottest movies aren't always the ones making the big bucks nationwide. Using Nielsen numbers for Manhattan theaters alone and comparing them to the performance of the national weekend box office can tell you a lot about our Blue State sensibilities. Or nothing at all! Each Monday afternoon, we will bring you the results.

The premise of the movie – two dudes, (Mr. Black and Mos Def ) have to remake VHS cassettes of popular movies themselves because Mr. Black’s brain got magnetized by the power plant nearby or something (don’t make us explain) – is fantastical, creative, and totally improbable. First of all, VHS tapes, really? We get that hipsters love being nostalgic for things that only happened eight or nine years ago, but we still have a hard time believing a whole neighborhood would frequent the Be Kind Rewind shop (has no one heard of Netflix in Passaic, New Jersey?). But let’s get past that little leap of faith. There are parts of the movie that genuinely work and are funny and sweet (and resist it as we may have tried, that whole Ghostbusters thing made us laugh), but others seemed like a stretch – like, did we need to have a heart-warming-town-assembling-around-the-small-little-shop-that-could? The film could have been boiled down to a hilarious online 20-minute sketch and we probably would have loved it. Danny Glover seems wasted in his role as a doddering, kindly, shop-owner and we still don’t know what the heck Mia Farrow is doing in this. But one thing is for sure, this movie will make you want to rent Ghostbusters. On DVD, of course.

Noah Baumbach’s Margot at the Wedding, from his own screenplay, turns out to be more ambitious but less clearly focused than was his much acclaimed debut film, The Squid and the Whale (2005), which was loosely based on members of his own family, particularly his mother and father. Seemingly knowing gossip at the time of The Squid and the Whale, among literary acquaintances of the Baumbachs’, insisted that Noah had been much harder on his father character, played brilliantly by Jeff Daniels, than on his mother character, played no less brilliantly by Laura Linney. If the title character in Margot at the Wedding, Nicole Kidman’s Margot Zeller, bears even a slightly reflex resemblance to the writer-director’s own mother, than he can be said to have fully expunged the alleged favoritism he showed his mother in The Squid and the Whale. This is to say that Ms. Kidman’s Margot is one of the most unsympathetically narcissistic protagonists one could imagine in Mr. Baumbach’s family farce-comedy of emotional errors and eternally failing relationships. Only an actress of Ms. Kidman’s stature, talent and proven magnetism could make her mercurial character bearable and watchable for the full 91 minutes of the film, in which she is in almost every scene.

When the picture begins, Margot happens to be on the way to the wedding of her sister Pauline (played by Jennifer Jason Leigh), though we learn later the two sisters had stopped talking to each other after Margot willfully broke up Pauline’s first marriage by something imprudent she said, as was her habit. Margot is a writer, you see, and writers in Mr. Baumbach’s world, and in the real world too, I imagine, are notorious for spilling the beans at the expense of their families and friends.

One of the biggest problems with Mr. Baumbach’s second film is that he seems to have made it up as he went along, throwing in two or three new characters here, and two or three laborious metaphors there. I must confess that I had trouble following all the proliferating subplots, and keeping all the relationships straight in my mind. For example, the budding non-relation between Margot’s teenage son, Claude (Zane Pais), and Pauline’s teenage daughter, Ingrid (Flora Cross), from her first marriage. They seem to have a thing for each other, but their hairdos’ are so messily alike that at times I had trouble telling them apart. There is much dressing and undressing in close quarters for all the main characters, and a casual, almost bohemian intimacy in their behavior.

One of the more interesting eccentrics in this carnival of eccentricity is Jack Black’s Malcolm, Pauline’s prospective second husband. Some people at the screening I attended couldn’t figure out why he had been written into the plot as such a hopeless loser, without a job or serious prospects, and self-consciously, albeit often charmingly and amusingly, self-deflating. Again, as with Ms. Kidman and Ms. Leigh, Mr. Black has reached such a high level in my estimation that he can do almost no wrong.

Then there is the main setting, an island off the New England coast, a comparatively underdeveloped offshoot of more posh and populous islands like Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. It seems a strangely desolate location for a wedding. Still, there seems to be enough of a downtown somewhere on the island to accommodate a well-attended book signing and interview session between the mini-celebrity author Margot and her writing partner and lover, Dick Koosman (Ciarán Hinds). The interview ends disastrously, of course, in one of Margot’s many spasms of self-recognition and self-loathing. Mr. Hinds, a distinctively charismatic presence, is another overqualified member of the cast. After a brief conversation with his daughter Maisy (Halley Feiffer), who, while babysitting for Pauline, became physically involved with the hapless Malcolm, the outraged father chases the would-be husband all the way to the beach. Dick catches up with the grotesquely clumsy Malcolm, and soundly thrashes him. It all seemed to come out of the blue, which leads me to accept the rumor that Ms. Feiffer’s Maisy had much of her part end up on the cutting room floor.

Much of the action swirls around a red oak tree on which Margot climbs to settle a doubt raised about her active childhood propensities. She gets way up on the tree, looks down triumphantly at the rest of the wedding party and then discovers to her horror, as they walk away, that she is too scared to come down. When the local fire department has to rescue her, it marks another burst of bravado ending in humiliation. The tree itself is dying, and because it infringes on a nasty neighbor’s property and is killing the plants and flowers in his garden, it has to be sawed down. Malcolm undertakes the task with his usual lack of organization and manages to have the tree fall where it can do the most damage to the already doomed wedding. It is in the midst of all this chaos and carnage that the very tentative trucelike reconciliation of Margot and Pauline is smashed to smithereens. It is about this time also that Margot’s estranged husband, John Turturro’s Jim, flits in and out of the movie from his home in Vermont after experiencing a briefly sensual reunion with Margot that leaves them both more bewildered than before. Yet by the end of the film, Margot and her son, Claude, are sitting together on a bus to her husband Jim’s home, much as they started off sitting together on a train to Pauline’s wedding. Only this time their roles are reversed, with Margot, so poised and confident in the beginning, having become so hysterically frazzled by the end that Claude, so restlessly unsettled in the beginning, virtually assumes the role of parental stability.

As hard as it is for the viewer to navigate the raging currents of the narrative, with all its structural flaws leading to too many abrupt entrances and exits, Mr. Baumbach deserves a great deal of credit for the pungency and humor of much of the dialogue. Mr. Baumbach claims in the production notes that the inspiration for his stormy saga of warring siblings sprang from a single, enigmatic image that came to the writer-director almost like a dream: that of a mother and a son sitting on a train. Oddly, Margot at the Wedding leaves the viewers with the impression of an illogically remembered dream.

There’s just something about Chris Rock that seems to inspire sloppy effusion. It may be his voice—that distinctive, gravelly growl that can slide up the scale to high-pitched incredulousness—or his wildly malleable face, one that seems able to register four different emotions and reactions at once. Maybe it’s the way he can get away with saying outlandish (and often uncomfortably true) things about race relations in America without seeming threatening. “Yeah, I love being famous. It’s almost like being white, y’know? People are nice to ya, they give you the benefit o’ the doubt …. You drive a flash car down the freeway and the cops’ll pull y’over, and before they even look they like, ‘What the f**k are you doing?’, and then they see it’s you and they like, ‘Awww man, it’s Chris Rock, it’s O.K.—man, we thought you was a nigga.’”

There’s been a lot to like: Take that first glimpse of him in 1987 with Beverly Hills Cop II, when another brilliant black comic named Eddie Murphy first noticed his shine. Then we got to know him on Saturday Night Live in the early 90’s—the skinny Brooklyn kid who, along with co-stars and friends Adam Sandler, Chris Farley and David Spade, managed briefly to make the show funny again. Before the reign of The Daily Show, there was Mr. Rock as the 1996 Presidential campaign correspondent for Politically Incorrect. There were the blockbuster stand-up acts, Pootie Tang, Nurse Betty, Dogma and a turn as a sassy zebra in Madagascar. There was the hysterical pathos of Everybody Hates Chris, inspired by his own life. Hell, we even loved him as the 2005 Oscar host (get a sense of humor, Sean Penn!).

Now comes the March 16 opening of I Think I Love My Wife. Co-written and directed by Chris Rock, the film is a fresh take on Eric Rohmer’s 1972 classic Chloe in the Afternoon. Mr. Rohmer’s original, part of his “Six Moral Tales” series (considered an essential pit stop in the oeuvre of New Wave cinema), is a serious examination of marriage, infidelity and human foibles. At first glance, a film that follows a blue-eyed suburbanite with a penchant for turtlenecks, Parisian cafés and afternoon assignations might not seem a natural fit for Mr. Rock. However, after a contemporary polishing with co-writer Louis C.K.—another brilliant comic who draws on the trials of married life and fatherhood—the film becomes the perfect vehicle to showcase what lies at the heart of Mr. Rock’s appeal: a genuine warmth that makes him impossible not to root for. In his new film, even as he risks repelling the audience by constantly flirting with thoughts of cheating on his very beautiful wife, we laugh at his internal struggle. To be honest, we’d follow him anywhere: to suburbia, to the city, to the wrong woman’s bed.

Mr. Rock, in fact, has it all wrong. Far from hating him, everybody loves Chris.