Margaret
Written and Directed
By: Kenneth Lonergan
Starring: Anna
Paquin, J. Smith-Cameron, Jeannie Berlin, Jean Reno, Allison Janey, Kieran
Culkin, Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, John Gallagher Jr., Rosemarie DeWitt, Matthew
Broderick, Hina Abdullah, Kenneth Lonergan, Michael Ealy, and Krystin Ritter.
Director of Photography: Ryszard Lenczewski, Editor: Anne
McCabe, Production Designer: Dan Leigh, Original Music: Nico Muhly
Rated: R for
language, sex, drugs, and a bit of violence.
The key
scene in Margaret, an epic yet personal
drama of trauma and grief in New York City, involves a class discussion of a poignant
line from Shakespeare’s King Lear.
The teacher (Matthew Broderick) asks for an interpretation of the line “As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods.” A couple of students give the usual
interpretation: our lives might seem important to us, but perhaps in a greater
scheme of things, we are nothing. But one student disagrees. If we are nothing
to the gods, then why do they give us so much attention? Perhaps we are more,
he demands. But the teacher won’t have it, “A number of scholars,” he decrees, “Have
confirmed this interpretation.” “But why?” the student fights back, as if he’s
fighting for his life. Why must our lives be so small and so feeble in the
large scheme of things?
It’s one of
a dozen bravura scenes in the second feature by Kenneth Lonergan, who made a splash
in 2000 with his drama You Can Count On
Me. You may note the 11 year gap, and if you see Margaret (which Fox Searchlight has quietly shoved into theaters as
quickly and quietly as possible), you may notice how young stars like Anna
Paquin and Matt Damon look. Mr. Lonergan shot this messy drama back in 2005,
with a contractual obligation to bring the film in at two and a half hours. For
years, he struggled to find the right cut, and things got messy with two
lawsuits, and even Martin Scorsese coming in to help him find that perfect cut.
After years of battle, Mr. Lonergan has finally, unsatisfactory, found a cut
that runs in the legal running time, though perhaps not his final vision. And it’s a shame, because as messy and
disjointed as Margaret is, it’s a
fascinating deeply confused film about the loss of innocence and the transformation
of guilt.
The title Margaret does not refer to Ms. Paquin’s
Lisa, but instead to a poem by Gerald Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall.” Lisa
is a 17-year-old girl living on the Upper West Side of Manhattan with her
brother and single mother Joan (J. Smith Cameron), who is preparing for a role
in a new play. Margaret is a flippant young woman not that far from the role
Ms. Paquin played in 25th Hour,
young, combative, flirtatious, but ultimately innocent. A nerdy classmate that helped her
cheat on a math test asks her out on a date, which she plays coy against.
Things
however come to a crashing start, literally, when Lisa becomes involved in the
death of a woman (Allison Janey), who is hit by a bus. Lisa holds onto the
woman, covered in blood and missing a leg, trying to bring peace when nothing
can be done. When giving her statement to the police, Lisa lies about the red
light the bus crossed, thus freeing the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) she knew was
at fault.
It is the
guilt of this accident that slowly palpitates over the film’s running time, as
Lisa first ignores her error and then slowly involves herself in the life of
the woman by befriending the woman’s best friend (Jeannie Berlin, extraordinary) and
confronting the issue head on. But Margaret
is about so much more than its narrative, with its long meditative shots,
constant illusions to art and opera, and multiple narratives. Lisa and her
mother fight back and forth as they struggle to connect (“Human connection is
impossible,” Lisa combats with pretensiousness), as she struggles to deal with
her performance and a new boyfriend (Jean Reno as the calmest, nicest man you’ve
ever met).
Shots of the Manhattan skyline
pepper the film’s interludes, including one not-so-subtle shot of a plane
flying across the air. Margaret’s
focus on grief as a 9/11 allegory might seem a bit simplistic, especially with
the film’s intense political debates between Lisa and a Syrian student (Hina
Abdullah, unforgettable for her small part), but Mr. Lonnergan never boils it
down to a simple 1:1 ratio. To him, grief and acceptance are a messy process by
which there is no satisfaction. Lisa constantly searches for something,
anything to make it better. When she and the best friend meet with a lawyer who
offers a lot of advice but not much hope, she keeps pressing on and on. She
needs to know that things have consequences, that there is meaning in death.
Mr. Lonnergan plays with the idea of the loss of innocence throughout Lisa’s
teenage life and the young Ms. Paquin totally captures the spirit of teenage
youth as she constantly switches between self-assured mess and destructive
neurotic. She screams at the top of her lungs, spits out words faster than any
screwball comedy, and fights back tears constantly. She is an epitome of
youthful destruction. The rest of the cast is very good too, and the film has a
number of minor roles relegated to now big stars like Rosemarie DeWitt, Michael
Ealy, and in a blink and you miss it, Kristen Ritter (she appears in the
background of the frame for one shot, without a single word of dialogue).
Margaret,
because it is a messy film about our messy reflection on tragedy, is certainly
a mess, and not everything congeals together. A subplot involving Matt Damon as
one of Lisa’s teachers seems cut short, and the film’s final few sequences,
which attempt to reach some sense of resolution between some of the characters,
falls short of hitting the emotional peaks it should. But can Mr. Lonnergan
reach that point, or is part of his point that it does feel unsatisfactory? It’s
hard to say—I hope someday we’ll see his full-fledged cut of the film (and Mr.
Scorsese’s as well), but part of Margaret
is that we all attempt to be operatic in our lives, as one person chides Lisa
for doing. We all want to be big characters, and have others see our personal
dramas observed by others in our attempts to feel important, to feel something (as Mr. Lonnergan lets us see
that nerd shed a single tear when Lisa later rejects him). But nothing
can ever make everything better, and no admittance of guilt can ever make
tragedy okay. Margaret is a disaster
of a film about the nature of what it means to live through disaster.
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