Title: Margaret
Director: Kenneth Lonergan
Starring: Anna Paquin, J. Smith-Cameron, Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon, Jean Reno, Jeannie Berlin, Kieran Culkin, Matthew Broderick, Kenneth Lonergan, Rosemarie Dewitt, Allison Janney
“Margaret,” the first film behind the camera from writer-director Kenneth Lonergan in more than a decade, is a hot mess. Considering its behind-the-scenes wrangling and long road to release, however, that’s not really that surprising. In 2000, Longergan helped bolster the mainstream careers of Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo with “You Can Count On Me,” the engaging, Oscar-nominated story of a fractured adult sibling relationship. In 2005 he shot his follow-up, “Margaret,” about a troubled high school teenager who witnesses a terrible bus accident and eventually tries to do right by a friend of the victim, owning up to her own culpability in an effort to render judgment upon the driver. Post-production delays and multiple lawsuits, however, combined to hold up the film’s release for more than five years. The result is neither as bad as that lengthy postponement might suggest, nor truly a diamond in the rough, but instead something in between.
Anna Paquin stars as Lisa Cohen, a bright New York City private high school student who’s used to sort of coasting by on her powers of feminine manipulation. She uses them to keep a male suitor at bay, twisting in the wind, and also receive nothing more than an admonition from a teacher, Aaron (Matt Damon), who knows she cheated on a test. Her demeanor changes, however, when she witnesses a woman get hit and killed by a bus. Lisa initially lies to police, but, believing that she was partially distracting the driver (Mark Ruffalo) at the time of the accident, she comes clean to the dead woman’s best friend, Kellie (Jeannie Berlin), and the pair proceed with a wrongful death civil suit.
Mixed in with all this are scenes of more typical coming-of-age variety. Lisa loses her virginity to Paul (Kieran Culkin), a cocksure bad boy; engages in a variety of heated classroom political debates; finds herself increasingly at odds with her mother Joan (J. Smith-Cameron), a Broadway actress dipping her toe back into the dating water with a Spanish suitor (Jean Reno); has pining conversations with her West Coast father (Lonergan); and eventually succeeds in seducing Aaron.
“Margaret” feels like a bunch of ideas flung at a wall, in the style of Jackson Pollock. Scene to scene, the writing often crackles, just because of playwright Lonergan’s skill with dialogue and character. But the movie runs over two-and-a-half hours, and never locates a confident groove of singular tonality. As such, it feels like a bunch of acting exercises — discrete scenes with overlapping characters, arranged in a kind of montage of emotional sweep. “Margaret” isn’t built for normal cathartic release, and so it will be a mostly frustrating experience for many viewers.
Still, the acting here is generally quite superb. Paquin in particular is fantastic. She won’t receive any awards attention because the movie is such a careening vehicle, but she locates the combined precociousness and vulnerability of teenagedom, and in a way that is raw but never false. Smith-Cameron, Lonergan’s real-life wife, is also quite good, showcasing both a single mom’s love and enormous frustration with her family, and halting attempts to add on a romantic component for herself. An arthouse bauble all the way, “Margaret” is unusual, and not always successful — but that’s hardly the worst thing one can say about a movie these days.
Technical: B-
Acting: A-
Story: C+
Overall: B-
Written by: Brent Simon
