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DIRECTOR Kenneth Lonergan CAST Anna Paquin, Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, Jean Reno An American indie film which has divided the critics, but the passion of many of the 5 star reviews has brought it wide attention. Paquin (brilliant) plays a bolshy New York teenager whose involvement in an accident provokes a guilt-driven trauma. A powerful, if sprawling, emotional drama of modern life. (2011 USA 149 minutes) Margaret centres on a 17-year-old New York City high-school student who feels certain that she inadvertently played a role in a traffic accident that has claimed a woman's life. In her attempts to set things right she meets with opposition at every step. Torn apart with frustration, she begins emotionally brutalising her family, her friends, her teachers, and most of all, herself. She has been confronted quite unexpectedly with a basic truth: that her youthful ideals are on a collision course against the realities and compromises of the adult world. BBFC advice: Contains very strong language, strong sex, a gory accident scene & drug use “Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret is a special film for many reasons, not the least of which is its now legendarily tortuous journey to the screen. Shot six years ago in New York, this breathtakingly ambitious drama of clashing ethics and responsibilities, plotted like a novel, was to be Lonergan’s second film after the much-admired, Oscar-nominated You Can Count On Me (2000). Only now does it reach us – many recuts, budgetary crises and legal squabbles later. In such situations – the many vexed movies of Warren Beatty spring to mind – it’s hard not to imagine that there isn’t something deeply wrong at the heart of a project, or at least in its resulting shape. So what’s particularly astonishing about Margaret is that it feels so burningly right. It’s rare, unstable, and kind of a masterpiece, albeit one you’ll have to race to catch in its single London venue, or risk waiting for a DVD release beset by who knows what further complications. Anyone can recognise the impediments to the film’s commercial viability, but not one of them makes it less than fascinating art. For starters, there’s no one called Margaret in it: that’s a reference to Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem Spring and Fall (“Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving?”), which pops up in an English literature class. The subject of both poem and film is what we grieve for, and what this says about ourselves. Here’s another off-putting thing: Anna Paquin’s main character, Lisa Cohen, has been described by reputable critics as infuriating, which she often is, not unlike the unassailably great characters Gena Rowlands got to play in peak-period John Cassavetes. She’s a 17-year-old of stormy convictions, huge in her stubbornness, oblivious (if not always wholly) to the hurt and insult she goes around causing. Lonergan coaxes sheer wonders out of Paquin, who’s never been anything like this ferociously brave before. The movie is fired up by a brilliant and shocking sequence in which Lisa tries to flag down a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo, sparingly used) and in an instant flips a lyrical, flirtatious tone into trauma and horror. The repercussions of this incident – I won’t say more – linger and won’t go away, but dramas of aftermath hardly come much messier. In this Babel of confused responses, the loudest aren’t necessarily the clearest. Lisa’s mother (Lonergan’s wife, the superb J Smith-Cameron), her maths teacher (Matt Damon) and other characters are dragged into her crisis of personality and all get burned. Lonergan makes it almost impossible to take sides, or not simply, within single scenes. He deals overtly with the fractious problems of discourse in the years immediately after 9/11 – bitter arguments between the half-Jewish Lisa and a Muslim classmate mesh themes of guilt and recrimination, which then bleed back out into every other facet of her life. The sum of this has riveting intellectual heft. The acting is uniformly wonderful. It’s a phoenix of a film, risen from the ashes of what looked alarmingly like failure, and it needs to be seen." UK RELEASE 2 December 2011 RUNNING TIME 149 minutes COUNTRY USA |
