A full 6 years after it was supposed to have come out, audiences finally are now able to see Kenneth Lonergan’s sophomore feature ‘Margaret’. For me, it’s almost a surreal experience to have sat down and watched it.  Delayed by lawsuits and infighting as well as an inability of the filmmaker to find a cut he could live with in the editing room, some had speculated that it might never end up on screens, especially when Martin Scorsese’s editor Thelma Schoonmaker couldn’t even do the job (not to mention Sydney Pollack and Scott Rudin).  The thing was, Lonergan had final cut and Fox Searchlight was unwilling to fire a director with that status, so it was a bit of a stalemate.  People have gotten to see the flick during this time.  Martin Scorsese declared the cut he saw to be a masterpiece, and a few years back our very own editor Clayton Davis got to see an early cut, checking in at over 3 hours.  The polite way of phrasing it is that he didn’t care for it and disagreed with Scorsese’s assessment.  In all honesty, he absolutely hated it.  Well, now in 2011 I’ve seen a much different cut and I come to you all to say…I think I loved it.  Granted, it’s clearly still a work in progress, but this is likely as close as writer/director Lonergan was ever going to get it to being done.  There’s a sense of randomness to some of the scenes, suggesting the edit is one of many considered, and the pacing is inconsistent…hell, there’s even a boom mike in one shot, but if you focus in on the story and the film itself, it’s kind of beautiful.  Maybe I’m reaching, but in many ways this is the big city version of ‘The Tree of Life’, just without all of the religion and writing issues that torpedoed Malick’s vision for me.  In all the ways that particular film didn’t work for me, this one did.  It’s full of ideas and even more packed with emotion, making for an intense viewing experience.

Taking its title from the poem “Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins (the apt verse is “It is the blight man was born for/It is Margaret you mourn for”), the film is a post 9/11 coming of age tale for Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), a 17 year old girl who has her entire world shattered by witnessing a bus accident.  Previously a somewhat spoiled and entitled girl with a narrow view of the world and a sense that things revolve around her, Lisa emerges from seeing a woman (Allison Janney) hit by a bus driven by a distracted driver (Mark Ruffalo) emotionally a wreck.  She was trying to get the driver’s attention and feels responsible for the death after giving a false police report stating the driver went through a green light when it was actually red.  This somewhat rightful guilt (she did essentially cause the accident) leads her down a path of questioning everything in her life, sometimes traumatically so.  She experiments with drugs and sex, all the while dealing with family issues, debating politics and foreign policy at school, and trying to figure out exactly what happened during the accident.  The thing is, Lisa still more or less sees the world as being all about her, whether she understands this or not, so often times she ends up making things worse for the people she comes into contact with.  At its core, this is a story about the loss of innocence that comes with emerging from the cocoon of childhood and your teen years.  The world is a rough place, and Lisa is going to have to learn to deal with it.  This journey, and how Lisa deals with her trauma, is what makes up the plot of the movie.  Yes, this is essentially a rather epic character study, but it really worked for me.

Anna Paquin obviously looks incredibly young here (but so does everyone else in the cast), but there’s a stark maturity to her performance that I’m not sure I was expecting.  She doesn’t sell the early Lisa as well as the 2nd and 3rd act one, but she does a fine job overall.  This is a huge part and for the most part she nails it.  This is one of her best big screen roles to date, and I’m glad we got a chance to see it.  No one else really gets the same focus as Paquin, but there is plenty of star power in the cast.  Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick have small parts as 2 of Lisa’s teachers (one of which becomes the object of her sexual desire…guess who), while Mark Ruffalo does something a little different as the bus driver.  There’s also the aforementioned Allison Janney in a tiny part as the accident victim, along with Jean Reno as a suitor of Lisa’s mother, an actress played by J. Smith Cameron.  Factor in Kieran Culkin as a sexual partner of Lisa’s, Olivia Thirlby in a tiny and almost jarring cameo, Betsy Aiden, Sarah Steele, and Jeannie Berlin (along with a small part for Lonergan himself), and this is one large ensemble cast.  Most don’t get too much to do, though Berlin is very good as the dead woman’s grieving friend. Mostly, they all are a part of Lisa’s world, and Paquin makes things work.  They’re all impacted by her, and she by them.

While I think Kenneth Lonergan hit a home run the first time out that’s hard to match with ‘You Can Count On Me’, he comes close here.  His direction is quite beautiful, and his screenplay bites off as much as any movie in a long time, somehow managing to chew most of it.  Some of the subplots don’t completely work, perhaps a victim of the editing process to whittle  around an hour from the running time, and no character is treated with too much attention besides the heroine.  These issues might have sank a lesser film, but ‘Margaret’ manages to rise above them.  The soul of the film is a timeless tale of innocence lost and the resolve it takes to face the world, but it’s told in a specific time and place.  New York City is made a character in and of itself, with almost a solid dozen instances of the skyline being observed in a shot.  Longergan has made one of the seminal post 9/11 films about New York.  To be Lisa Cohen is to be a resident of the city in the days, months, and years following September 11th.  This feeds in to Lonergan being concerned more than anything with Lisa’s intellectual struggles.  I wasn’t sure he could pull it all off, but somehow he did, majestically so at times.

In the end, ‘Margaret’ arrives the better part of a decade later as a film with a lot going for it, but with the stigma of already being a failure.  I’m here to assure you that it’s far from that, though it’s a 2 and a half hour character study that obviously won’t be for everyone.  Sheer curiosity should get some of you to give it a shot, and for the rest of you, take my word for it that there’s a lot going on with this movie and it’s well worth your time.  It’s not quite in my current top 10 of the year so far, but it’s in the top 15, and that’s nothing to sneeze at, considering I’m well on my way to seeing over 200 films by the end of the year.  Embrace this epic poem of a film, and you’ll be glad that you did!

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