In the same loose gasp of Margaret’s two-and-a-half hour run time is a jumbled mess of
disconnected half-thought themes and scenes and a deeply affecting, bogglingly
complex picture of human emotion and moral quandaries. It’s a film that feels sifted,
chopped, and cajoled into being. Not all of it works – thematic concerns and
characters alike seem to float in and out of the film with no rhyme or reason –
but it remains such a powerful, sweeping yet intimate collection of moments
that shuffle towards a powerful climax. It’s rich and thought provoking, and I’ll
take that over flawlessly dull any day.
The film is a quintessential sophomore effort, bigger in
ambition, weightier in scope, tremendously messy in result. Writer-director
Kenneth Lonergan, after the 2000 release of his terrific, small-scale debut You Can Count on Me, filmed this new
film six years ago, in the fall of 2005. Since then, the film has been wrangled
around in post-production with artistic perfectionism under a cloud of
unhelpful lawsuits and countersuits between the studio and financiers, conflict
between the director and the editors, and even the deaths of two of the
producers. Getting the film finished at all with so much strife puts Lonergan
on a short list with Terrence Malick and Terry Gilliam of great directors who
work with a potent mix of genius, patience, and bad luck.
With the film’s background out of the way, I’m eager to turn
to the film itself. Margaret is about
Lisa, a teenage girl (Anna Paquin) who is startlingly, frustratingly real. Her
moods swing wildly. She can be pleasant and flirty and then all of a sudden
become a snapping vindictive twerp. She’s just a kid, one capable of great
precociousness and blind to the overwhelming extent of her own naïveté. Living
in relative privilege with her stage actress mother (J. Smith-Cameron) and her
little brother (Cyrus Hernstadt) in New York City, she has little practical
reason to involve herself in anything but the constructed conflict that arises
out of the typical teen problems.
She fights with her family. She’s attracted to two of her
peers (John Gallagher Jr. and Kieran Culkin) and can’t quite sort out her
feelings. One of her teachers (Matt Damon) has caught her cheating on her
geometry tests. Another, her English teacher (Matthew Broderick), strikes her
as kind of dorky, yet his readings of poetic language are sometimes moving in a
way she can’t find words to express. These are all common enough adolescent
problems, sources of angst that fade with maturity and age. She’s still in the
midst of sorting out competing impulses and emotions. Then, one day while
wandering the streets of the city in search of a cowboy hat to buy, she catches
the eye of a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) as he pulls away from the curb. He’s
wearing a cowboy hat. She tries to run after the bus, hoping to get the chance
to ask him where he bought his hat. In this brief moment of distraction, the
bus hits a pedestrian (Allison Janney).
Lisa feels responsible for the accident and lies to the
police to protect the driver. But then, the memory of the incident eats away at
her. She’s deeply affected, rattled, disturbed and distressed. And yet the
world moves on. Her mother finds a new boyfriend (Jean Reno, with a bit of an
odd note performance for this film). Her teachers keep teaching. Her friends (Olivia
Thirlby and Sarah Steele) keep chattering. The boys are still interested in
her. The world keeps spinning. And yet how can it keep spinning when she has
been in the middle of such a traumatic incident, an out-of-the-blue moment of
violence for which her sense of culpability is eating her alive, is churning
her emotions, won’t let her rest easy? So she lashes out. (Several scenes in
the film draw out a post-9/11 parallel with some potency.) She snaps at her
mother. She cancels a trip to visit her father. She takes steps to contact the
family of the woman hit by the bus and finds a strange sense of comfort in connecting
with a woman (Jeannie Berlin) who was a friend of the victim. Lisa selfishly convinces
her to sue, to keep the pain of the moment alive in the courts and hanging over
the driver’s head.
Though the plot is driven to a certain extent by the actions
and emotions of Paquin, the film doesn’t rely for its impact on her alone. The
supporting characters are so fully, tenderly realized with nuanced performances
that weave into the frazzled fabric that they feel to be as startlingly,
frustratingly real as the teenage girl they all come into contact with. Gallagher’s
lovesick teen, Damon’s caring teacher, Ruffalo’s casually troubled bus driver,
Culkin’s lothario, Janney’s dying woman and Berlin’s mourning friend all are so
beautifully acted and wonderfully played that they add up to an ensemble of
depth and interest. “We aren’t just supporting players in your life!” Berlin shouts
at Paquin in one particularly sharp encounter. Though they are technically the
film’s supporting cast, they’re so well drawn that they hardly feel ignored.
Out of the cast, J. Smith-Cameron stands out. As the mother,
Smith-Cameron exudes thwarted warmth, a caring compassion that is ineffective
and unreceived by the adolescent angst to which it is directed. She makes her
living embodying emotions of characters, yet she finds herself frustrated by
the difficulties of “playing” the mother. In a terrific scene, she argues with
her daughter, devolving into a great mimic of her behavior. She plays the part,
but she has no reference for her own identity. She'll be there for her daughter whenever her daughter rediscovers the need for maternal comfort. This is an example of the film’s
beneficial looseness and choppiness. A character of great depth and thematic
importance seems to float in and out of focus, ultimately useful, but not
always clear.
Lonergan’s Margaret is
a film of big ideas and broad scope, juggling dozens of characters and themes around
the central girl’s dilemma. It features a prominent quote from George Bernard
Shaw, tossed off and referenced casually, but it illuminates what themes the
film is playing with. The full quote, from his 1903 play Man and Superman, is one character’s condemnation of another’s
“regarding the world as a moral gymnasium built expressly to strengthen your
character in, [which] occasionally leads you to think about your own confounded
principles when you should be thinking about other people’s necessities.” This
is a film about just that. Growing up is hard to do. Learning how to interact
with others is complicated. Dealing with sudden violence, especially when one
feels guilt, is messy. Margaret is a
sprawling evocation of this hard, complicated mess.
It’s a film that feels in some ways to be tragically
blinkered by its own ambition, it’s own difficulty. Moments, whole subplots,
fall entirely flat, growing miscalculated and ill-advised, or just plain
disappearing without a trace. Lisa’s romantic entanglements fail to solidify in
any meaningful way. A scene in which a character boldly, perhaps falsely,
announces a major medical procedure has all the out-of-left-field suddenness
and is as quickly dropped as the infamous breast cancer revelation in The Room. But sorting through the striking footage that rolls by over the course of Margaret
proves ultimately rewarding, even moving. It’s a powerful, difficult mess,
worth seeing despite the trouble.