4 stars out of 5
I don’t know whether to include Margaret in my end-of-year list of best films, and there are a few reasons:
1) I saw this on video, not in the theater, and I generally only consider first-run films.
2) I have no idea what the official year of release is for this movie. 2012? 2011? 2008 (the year it says in the credits)?
3) I can’t decide if this is a genuinely great movie or a very good movie mired by self-indulgence and an unwillingness to edit.
The 2008 fact will make instant sense to any fans of HBO’s The Newsroom. You know John Gallagher, who plays, um, I don’t remember the character’s name but he looks like Jim from The Office? He’s in this, and whoa, he’s a playing a teenager. That freaked me out a little.
But the star here is Anna Paquin and wow, is she terrific. I would say Oscar-worthy, but, um, did she win in 2008? No? Was she eligible last year? Oh this is confusing.
What you’ve got here is a snapshot of life. I occasionally like to use the term hyper-realism and oh man is this hyper-realism. I felt like a voyeur, spying on people’s real lives. And the message I came away with is, life is incredibly complicated. And if you toss a tragedy on top of everything else, it’s just too much to bear. And yet bear we must. Obla-di, obla-da.
Paquin’s character—who is not named Margaret, but Lisa, so that’s confusing also—witnesses a horrific death and feels partially responsible. Oh, but there’s so much more going on. Her mom is a successful Broadway actress and is pretty busy with that; Lisa doesn’t get the supervision she might need at this point in her life. Dad is off in California with his surly girlfriend so he’s no help either. And even if they were around, Lisa is at an extremely annoying stage of her teen years where everything’s an argument. Oh also she’s got this burgeoning sexuality thing going on and is learning she can make males of any age do her bidding.
Filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan, who also plays the faraway dad and directed You Can Count on Me back in 2000, my god I loved that movie but speed it up a notch on the moviemaking, huh, pal?? Wait, what was I talking about? Oh yeah, he also inserts: the challenges of being a teacher, the Middle East conflict, anti-semitism, grieving, the intricacies of the American legal system, the difficulties of dating in middle age, the difficulties of dating as a teenager, New York City traffic laws, the sad fact that young people and old people just can’t get along, and every other topic in the world in this movie.
The movie’s release was held up because Lonergan wanted to release a 3-hour version, and the movie company said no, you get 150 minutes, deal with it. Normally I side with the director in these disputes (go get ’em, Terry Gilliam!), but Lonergan, come on, man! Three hours?!? Christ. At 150 minutes this felt very very long. Late in the movie he teases us with a crane shot, getting farther and farther away from Paquin walking down the street, and the camera moves skyward. And I’m sitting there on my sad IKEA couch thinking, hey, that’s deep, she’s just one of all those people, and they have all got problems. Bravo, brother. But then the movie kept going. That is not fair!
He could’ve cut out a ton of stuff and still had a compelling movie. There’s a scene with Matt Damon—yes, Matt Damon is in this, and Ruffalo, and Broderick—and it seems so totally random that, I don’t know, maybe in the additional 30 minutes which is apparently available on video and if you watch it, you are a better person than me, maybe maybe that particular storyline was fleshed out a tad more. I bet the other actress in that scene saw this and was all, “You have to be effing kidding me, I was Rachel in Rachel Getting Married and I’m in this for 12 goddamn seconds? Get my agent on the phone.”
And yet, taken all together, I felt like I saw something heavy, something important, something good. One of the better movies I’d seen in a while.
Maybe.
Jack Silbert, curator