Chris Vognar

I've always been puzzled by viewers who don't like a movie because the characters aren't nice. After all, you're not having breakfast with them. They're not marrying your kids. They don't exist, and if they're interesting enough to hold down the center of a film, even in an appalling way, that should be enough.

So you don't have to like Margot, the quietly acidic title character played by Nicole Kidman in Margot at the Wedding. Even if her creator, writer and director Noah Baumbach, thinks she's just fine.

"I find her sympathetic," Mr. Baumbach says by phone. "But when I was writing her and working with Nicole on playing her, I didn't think of her as unsympathetic or sympathetic. I just thought of her as the character."

That's his prerogative, even if many viewers will have a hard time sharing it. He birthed Margot, who spends much of the film demeaning her adolescent son (Zane Pais) and lashing out at her sister (Mr. Baumbach's wife, Jennifer Jason Leigh). And he may be getting tired of defending his characters and explaining that they are not supposed to be members of his own family.

His last film, 2005's The Squid and the Whale, took a brutally uncompromising child's-eye view of divorce academic style.

It was indeed inspired by the divorce of his own parents, both of whom, Georgia Brown and Jonathan Baumbach, spent a considerable amount of time as film critics.

But "inspired by my parents' divorce" is a far cry from "these are my parents," a distinction that was lost upon a lot of journalists at the time.

He admits a fascination with the workings of families in crisis. But he says it all starts with the characters, not with his kin.

"I think I'm always interested in people's origins and how that often cycles through family and how we're haunted by family," he says. "In Margot there are all of these offshoots of family. Mother and son leaving the father and brother, and the sisters without the other sister and the parents, and how family reinvents itself in different environments, how these other people are present and not present at the same time. I don't set out to write about family. It just can't help but enter the equation."

You can buy that if you like. But whatever is driving Mr. Baumbach to excavate the layers of family discontent seems to be working. Squid and Margot have zero formula or sentimentality.

They have a natural flow that works perfectly in softening their volatility just enough to let it sting without entering the dreaded self-indulgence zone.

And they follow director Nicholas Ray's dictum that characters must be damaged enough that viewers can walk away happy to know their families aren't so bad.

But now we're getting back to the "sympathetic" question.

"I think the movie is pleasurable," Mr. Baumbach, 38, says. "Even if it's a hard experience for someone, I think it's a rewarding one. I feel like people want good movies. So here's one."

We'll take it.