Starring Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Jack Black. Rated 14A. Opens Friday, December 7, at the Fifth Avenue Cinemas

There's a moment in the darkly funny Margot at the Wedding, after the prospective groom–a likable loser with "the emotional equivalent of bad feng shui" who is played by a (slightly) toned-down Jack Black–is informed that he'll soon be an accidental father. He's struggling with the notion but seems to be almost looking forward to "the moment when I'll stop being the centre of the universe".

Obviously, the guy–a neurotic would-be music critic–hasn't been paying attention. That moment still hasn't come for the other adults around him. That includes his blue-blooded fiancée, Pauline (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and her overbearing sister, Margot (Nicole Kidman), even though it says "parent" on their pedigrees.

Pauline has a feisty preteen daughter (Flora Cross) from an earlier marriage–a union she says her sis helped wreck with a sharp-edged short story published in the New Yorker. And Margot has brought to the family's seaside Long Island home her sensitive son, Claude (Zane Pais), the subject of a stunning variety of verbal tortures.

Writer-director Noah Baumbach comes from a family of writers. (His mother was the chief film critic for The Village Voice for some time.) But this doesn't feel like a hit job; the characters are too confused to be entirely hateful, and they come across as people, not symbols. In any case, all the adults are complicit in their destructive roundelays.

The film is heavier on psychology than event, and that's okay, especially since some of the dramatic overlay feels a little self-conscious. A glance at the names, and the film's title, tells you he's referencing the deceptively sunny fables of France's Eric Rohmer (think Pauline at the Beach). As well, the windswept isolation of intertwined female egos owes more than a little to Ingmar Bergman's Persona. And the business about an ancient tree with gnarly roots threatening the neighbourhood is a bit on the obvious side. Still, Baumbach isn't looking for the metaphysical underpinnings of these sexy monsters; he actually has something simpler and more oddly affectionate in mind.

The director's language is precisely crafted, and it's given life by uniformly fine performances. The kids, all newcomers, are terrific, and there are exemplary turns by John Turturro, as Margot's baffled husband, and Ciarán Hinds, as her current, and possibly toxic, lover. None of those would matter much without such frighteningly acute work from Kidman and Leigh. The latter, it should be noted, is married to Baumbach. And it's always so nice to have family around.