Margaret review
Team Margaret. For anyone who hasn’t been following the saga of Kenneth Lonergan’s grief drama’s long road to the screen it goes a little something like this. Lonergan’s debut film as director, “You Can Count On Me,” was a sizable indie hit (helping to launch Mark Ruffalo’s career) so inbetween the occasional writing gig (“Gangs of New York” among others), Lonergan began work on a follow-up. The ambitious film, set in NYC still reeling from the aftershock of 9/11, went before cameras in 2005 with an eyed 2006 release date. But that date came and went and so did the next several years without so much as a word from production. This would all make more sense for an independent production but this was a Fox Searchlight film, the indie powerhouse behind “Little Miss Sunshine,” “Black Swan” and nearly half the arthouse hits you can name from the last 2 decades. After what can only have been thousands of hours in the editing room to produce a cut within the contractual 2.5 hour limit, the film was eventually rescued (salvaged?) by none other than Martin Scorsese and his longtime editor Thelma Schoonmaker who called the film “a masterpiece.”
Very quietly the studio released the film into a handful of theatres back in September and reviews were modest at best. It was not the disaster they had expected nor the masterpiece they had been promised. The film disappeared within a few weeks. Until a funny thing happened: a vocal minority of reviewers started touting the film as a flawed gem and one of the year’s best. Suddenly a full-fledged #teammargaret movement began to pressure Fox into sending out screeners to boost the films awards chances (which they refused to do.) Then “Margaret” began appearing on nearly every critic’s Top 10 list, it seemed the more the studio resisted, the more the critics pushed. Suddenly, the film that had died quietly 4 months ago was the must-see release of the fall. I suspect much of the excitement came from the fact that you couldn’t see it even if you wanted to. Until quietly a week or so ago the film appeared at a tiny East Village screening room in NYC. Whether this late in the game strategy was devised by critics or the studio itself, it’s working. The matinee show I caught yesterday had all but sold out all 75 seats in the room. So how was the film?
A pre-“True Blood” Anna Paquin stars as Lisa Cohen, an Upper West Side prep school student who witnesses and unintentionally causes a bus accident that claims the life of a woman crossing the street (Alison Janney). The woman dies horrifically in her arms and though she initially lies to protect the bus driver responsible (Mark Ruffalo), she suddenly and inexplicably changes her mind and spends much of the film trying to do everything in her power to see him punished for the incident. Except when she isn’t. The curious and captivating thing about “Margaret” is that from one scene to the next, you really have no idea where it’s going. Lisa cries and rants her way through dialogue like a marathon runner, sprinting across 25 cent words only a screenwriter might use. But she is undeniably a complex character, which is almost startling to see onscreen. Not all of her behavioral quirks seem to be in service of moving the plot forward. For a while, this becomes entrancing. She grieves in one scene and decides (almost casually) to lose her virginity in the next and neither action is tied to the other. Whether this is by accident or design, it becomes fascinating. There are so many characters here, you’re not really sure where things might be going.
Those other characters include Lisa’s mother Joan (J. Smith Cameron, the director’s wife), a self-involved theatre actress and her boyfriend Ramone (Jean Reno), schoolteachers (Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick) and classmates (including Olivia Thirlby and Kieran Culkin). As even it’s admirers have admitted, many story threads here seem truncated (as the rumored Director’s Cut is over 3 hours in length) leaving actors like Damon (looking incredibly young) stranded in a few brief scenes. But allowing the storylines to breathe won’t necessarily solve the film’s other problems. Some scenes (especially towards the beginning) are incredibly awkwardly staged, acting is inconsistent and the more the film becomes about pursuing a legal case for the accident, the more it starts to lose its way. I didn’t care about the results, I’m not sure Lisa really did either and I wondered why the film seemed to hinge on it. The dialogue in the classroom is politically charged but comes off like a screenwriter speaking to the audience instead of students speaking to each other making some of the post-9/11 politics seem a little dated. (The unintentionally funniest moment was movie theatre marquee showing “Flightplan,” “The 40 Year Old Virgin” and “Roll Bounce.”)
Divorced from the hype, I’m not sure I would have thought much the film had I not been so intently looking to the film for some brilliance, meaning and feeling. Nico Muhly’s beautiful score wonderfully elevates the drama as does the operettas which lend a gravitas the film might not have necessarily earned. But still, it’s hard to resist its charms. “Margaret” didn’t deserve to be delayed for years and unceremoniously dumped into a few theatres any more than it deserves to sit atop anyone’s Best Of 2011 list. Neither is a fair outcome for the film nor does it represent what’s on the screen. The versions that might have been simply aren’t and overcompensating with praise isn’t doing the film any favors either.
