Margaret (2011)

USA, 187 minutes
Director / writer: Kenneth Lonergan
Photography: Ryszard Lenczewski
Music: Nico Muhly
Editors: Mike Fay, Anne McCabe
Cast: Anna Paquin, J. Smith-Cameron, Kenneth Lonergan, Jeannie Berlin, Mark Ruffalo, Rosemarie DeWitt, Matt Damon, Jean Reno, Allison Janney, Matthew Broderick, Kieran Culkin

Margaret is more than just another chapter in the strange and wide-ranging career of precocious Anna Paquin though it's all of that, perhaps her best performance ever, appearing years late in what became one of those legendary cursed and lost movie projects. Paquin previously showed up as a 10-year-old in The Piano, a fraught tween in Fly Away Home, a jaded college student in her experimental phase in The Squid and the Whale, and Rogue of the X-Men, a superhero who siphons away the powers of others. She always seemed to be playing a lost soul who feels like a mutant outsider, and she is deployed well here at the head of a remarkable class of players collected by director and writer Kenneth Lonergan. The casting, indeed, is one of the strong points in Margaret, a movie with many of them.

Lonergan hasn't made a movie yet that is less than extraordinary, though there are only three of them, with You Can Count on Me (still his best) and Manchester by the Sea. It's not clear exactly why Margaret became one of Hollywood's great lost projects. Mostly shot in 2005, it languished for years in post-production. Lonergan had rights to the final cut, reportedly, but the studio would take nothing over 150 minutes and Lonergan could not get it under three hours. Eventually relations became acrimonious and then there were lawsuits, with the film released in 2011 as a bitter afterthought and to meet legal obligations. It had a brief theatrical run in truncated form (149 minutes, which can still be seen for four bucks on Amazon) and then a bare-bones "extended cut" DVD, bearing the burden of its expectations—and meeting them. But the delays and PR disaster took their toll. Few seem to know that Margaret is actually one of the best American movies of this century so far.



Paquin carries Margaret for virtually all its length in a bravura, overwhelming turn. This is a long movie but it has little flab. Lisa Cohen (Paquin—there's no one named Margaret here but I'll get to that in a second) is 16 or 17, living her life in high-strung adolescent train-wreck mode. She is attending a privileged Manhattan private school on a scholarship, parents divorced. Like many teens, Lisa uses impossibly high ideals to judge and find everything wanting, including especially herself. She carelessly, thoughtlessly, and inadvertently causes a traffic accident that kills a middle-aged woman. Lisa sees the woman die bleeding out in the street from a severed leg, exchanges words with her, tries to help her, is holding her when she dies. Later, she finds herself covered in the gore. Her inability to get over it, coupled with her ingenious natural adolescent ability to force everyone around her into supporting roles in her own drama, drive this movie beyond the final scenes. It's turbulent and haunting.

I've been catching up with The Leftovers lately and in a way everything is starting to look post-9/11 to me, but Margaret has a good claim to it, consciously working through the aftermath, which is a radioactive point of simmering tensions among the students at the Manhattan school, flaring up in debates about politics and current events or literature. It's there even in math class. Lisa is convinced, or anyway takes that position in her classroom arguments, that "those people" only want to kill us, and the proof is 9/11. It reads to me as a callow adolescent position taken for the sake of a passive-aggressive (or raging, in this case) hostility, holding others at bay. All the details of Lisa's story get filled in as Lonergan's patient, probing screenplay unfolds: parents in the creative class with their own struggles, Lisa a hot child in the city, with high standards but bottomless need, and the indifference of teeming New York streets. Margaret is full of Ozu-style pillow shots, where the movie turns its attention away from the turmoil churning in the foreground and spends a minute or two at a time observing the stately but indifferent urban landscape. They are necessary relief when they come.

Margaret takes its name from a 1918 poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring and Fall," which is read aloud in class for Lisa's edification (really, for ours) by an English teacher played by the ever mild, sweater-vested, and vaguely creepy Matthew Broderick. Dedicated "to a young child" the poem addresses "Margaret" (pronounced, per this teacher, with stress on the last of three syllables, mar-guh-RET). She is a toddler devastated by the loss of leaves on the trees come autumn. The comparison is harsh but apt. People die run over in the streets as surely as leaves turn in the fall. It is Lisa's virtue and her tragedy that she cannot come to terms with it. Caught in claustrophobic webs of middle-class social relations, taken advantage of by New York sharpies with their own motives, Lisa struggles violently to break free and succeeds only in damaging more people. As painful as it can be to watch, it is actually harder to look away from Margaret.