MARGARET

Written and Directed by Kenneth Lonergan

Starring Anna Paquin, Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo and Alison Janney

Lisa Cohen: I just need to talk to somebody who doesn’t completely misunderstand who I am or what’s going on inside me.

It isn’t easy growing up, no matter who you are and no matter what you have to live through while you’re doing it. Take Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) for instance. She is a 17-year-old girl living on the Upper West Side in New York City. She goes to a private school and comes from a broken home. Her pre-occupations are not unlike any other girl’s her age - she bickers with her family, she wants to lose her virginity, she has opinions about worldly subjects she is only beginning to understand. And she is only just realizing that it is up to her to make sense of her own world when she inadvertently causes a fatal traffic accident. Suddenly, the world makes even less sense than it did just moments earlier.

MARGARET is writer/director, Kenneth Lonergan’s highly anticipated follow-up to his Oscar nominated 2001 feature, YOU CAN COUNT ON ME. The film went into production in 2005, when the now 29-year-old star, Paquin, who certainly gives a vibrant and youthful performance, was but 23. It then spent years in turnaround as Lonergan tinkered with the lengthy 3-hour+ runtime, trying to get distributer, Fox Searchlight, to sign off on it. It was scheduled to be released in 2007 but the cut was deemed unreleasable. In the midst of legal battles, Martin Scorsese and his faithful editor, Thelma Schoonmaker came on board to see what they could make of it. Their edit is the official theatrical release and both company and director are apparently happy with the end results.

Indeed all parties should be pleased as MARGARET is an engaging coming of age story. Lisa does not know how to process what she has witnessed and has no idea how to make right what she caused. She looks down every road for solace but constantly runs into walls and subsequently, she begins to act out as a means to make her life about something other than that accident. Perhaps in her own self-destruction, she can eradicate her guilt. If only life were that simple though. If it were, not only would Lisa find a simple path to peace but Lonergan would have found a simpler path to finishing this film. Life allows for things to pass in their own time though and with that, MARGARET needed to take this long to be released. Like Lisa, it too had some growing pains to go through first.

425. Margaret

425. (02 Oct) Margaret (2011, Kenneth Lonergan)* 37



It's clear why Fox Searchlight considered Margaret to be unreleasable. The Dickensian abundance of plot and characters suggests a poorly condensed miniseries, not a movie. While it is hardly necessary for loose ends to be tied up, there are so many throwaway scenes here that at some point it hardly seems like Margaret required salvaging. Whatever movie Lonergan initially intended to make would have barely been topical or interesting six years ago. All this time later, it's dated, plodding, and fails to make much of an impact.

The few scenes that work play well only because Lonergan is letting the melodrama run amok. Jeannie Berlin, in particular, has no restraint. While her performance is silly at times, she brings a joy to Margaret that's otherwise lacking. Anna Paquin handles herself quite well, taking Lonergan's grossly unbelievable, misshapen dialogue and giving it a bit of a life. Her character is written to be rather unlikable, but Paquin has an incredible, natural charisma. During Allison Janney's early death scene, Paquin shows a first spark that suggests she'll steal the show and it's not particularly surprising when she continues on that hot streak. She screams and cries like a pro. If the script wasn't so godawful, Paquin might've been in Oscar consideration.

Subplots involving Matt Damon and several brief classroom scenes do not work whatsoever. They're Lonergan's attempts at heavy-handed political commentary. Family scenes with J. Smith-Cameron and Paquin have much more intensity and truth to them. There is a certain beauty in some of the tearful, angry arguments and in the final scenes where Smith-Cameron and Paquin finally find common ground. But these are fleeting moments in a film where almost all of it could've been on the cutting room floor. Even Mark Ruffalo's big scene which puts the entire second act into motion is somewhat underwhelming.

Enumerating failures in Margaret is difficult since the film fails on almost every basic level. With unfathomably clumsy writing and editing that forcefully, desperately tries to give shape to a shapeless story, it's immediately clear this is a disaster. But like the film's bus crash that sets the plot into motion, it's hard to turn away. Even when the film consistently enters laughable, over-the-top territory, it's a fascinating monstrosity.