A little navel-gazing can go a long way. Sadly, Noah Baumbach’s patience-trying follow-up to the Oscar-nominated The Squid and the Whale gets lost in its own belly button.

Perennial frosty-pants Nicole Kidman is well cast as the knotted ball of self-pity and resentment that is Margot, while Mrs Baumbach herself (Leigh) plays Margot’s slightly less uptight sister Pauline and Jack Black extends himself not a jot as Pauline’s fiancé Malcolm – basically the lost member of Tenacious D.

With her pubescent son Claude (Zane Pais) in tow, Margot returns to the family home in Vermont where the slacky couple intend to marry beneath the old tree in the garden.

Unfortunately, the weird hillbilly neighbours (we’re obviously on the Vermont-Louisiana border) like nothing more than sunbathing in the nude, gutting swine for the family hog-roast and demanding that their neighbours cut the tree down.

As is her wont, Margot makes the situation worse. And when Pauline confides that she is pregnant, Margot just has to blab. She also does nothing to improve her relationships with Claude, her decent but soon-to-be-ex-husband Jim (Turturro), or even her equally devious lover and writing partner Dick (the underused Ciaran Hinds).

Competitive, critical and hypocritical, she blames everyone but herself for her own failings while lambasting Pauline for projecting her inadequacies and insecurities onto other people.

This is highlighted in the film’s best scene when dirty Dick puts her on the spot at a public discussion of her latest work. Kidman brilliantly conveys Margot’s distress but while her family is sympathetic, the situation elicits a certain schadenfreude.

Baumbach goes off on several tangents; some heavy-handed, others pointless.

One scene has Jim picking up a woman whose dog has been run over, simply for Margot to deliver the revelation that she wouldn’t have stopped. You don’t say.

Later, the tree’s fate is made predictably symbolic. And what’s with that bug in Margot’s ear and those Deliverance types next door?

Baumbach also tells us nothing we didn’t already know about sex. Previously heralded as the new Woody Allen, he’s more like Todd Solondz gone soft and slightly hysterical.

And for all their introspection, none of his characters really change. Nor does his higgledy-piggledy construction prevent the film from ending more or less where it came in.

Those expecting fresh Squid will be disappointed. With few laughs and much whining, Margot takes the fun out of dysfunctional. It’s a damp squib with lots of wail.

Elliott Noble