Margaret

Am I the only one who feels that Anna Paquin's acting is not the best, but probably the worst aspect of this film? For the entirety of the overlong runtime, but most markedly in the several outlandish scenes with Mr. Aaron, a strangely cast Matt Damon, her reading of the lines was overdone and unnatural. The intonation and pitch, among other things, seemed extremely forced and, well, like acting! In one scene, she accuses Emily of being "strident" and when she gets upset, modifies it to "emphatic". Official dictionary definitions would tell us that the key difference between the two words is the negative connotation that accompanies the former. Well, Paquin's acting and delivery of her lines can be described as strident, not emphatic.

The aforementioned scene is actually an example of the cleverness and wit found in Kenneth Lonergan's script, and I am confident that a book version of this film would garner a much higher rating from me. The premise is ingenious and the story engaging. The relevant scenes were insightful and thought provoking, inviting hours of discussion. Unfortunately, the critical word in that sentence is "relevant", because this lost potential of a masterpiece film was full of irrelevant scenes. Even irrelevant characters. A significant amount of time is dedicated to some high school classroom political debates, which would be quite compelling in another context, but distracting and confusing here, given its inapplicability to Lisa Cohen's narrative. Even the film title is irrelevant! I am actually partial to clever or not obvious film titles, but "Margaret" is neither of these. It refers to yet another inconsequential scene that should have been edited out, more specifically to the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem read aloud in her English class. The narrator in the poem speaks to a young girl named Margaret, who is grieving the death of autumn leaves as if they were dying friends explaining to her that although it feels profound, grieving is an inescapable part of the human condition. This scene is not long enough, nor the message prolific enough to warrant the naming of the entire 3 hour film.

From Salon: Rarely has a film with such a great cast and so many moments of terrific writing and such high dramatic goals, overdone but beautiful cinematography, been so messy and disorganized and fundamentally bad... like going to a friend's house for dinner to discover that they've apparently had a breakdown, and bought all sorts of delicious ingredients with no recipe in mind: Ice cream followed by lentil soup followed by sashimi followed by uncooked root vegetables, with half-kneaded bread dough and Pinot Noir poured over your head.

True, I watched the 36 minutes longer extended 3 hours and 6 minutes version, but I suspect I would have actually been even more dissatisfied with the shorter versions, since even more subplots were left hanging. Even in this full extended version, too much was left unresolved. Not surprising, given the labyrinth mess of plots and subplots, arbitrary detours and illogical tangents. "Margaret" is a film that would have dearly benefited from some serious killing of the darlings. And one look into the long process and legal drama surrounding the release of this film will indicate that I'm far from alone in this thinking!

Such loss of potential. Could have been a masterpiece. Alas, the best I can grant is a 6/10, and that's even with the extra points that come with any Mark Ruffalo film (stellar as always, even in his limited character time)!

Margaret – CATCH IT (B+) Margaret is very interesting movie about a teenage girl partially involved in woman death in a brutal accident. The movie deals with how she is wants the bus driver to at least accept his mistake too and have some remorse or gilt. The movie takes to her journey how she tries to deal with her conscious. She is now torn apart with frustration and begins to emotionally brutalizing her family, her friends, her teachers, and most of all, herself. Anna Paquin's performance as Margaret is terrific. She literally lived the role. From start to finish you won't be able to take your eyes off her, she may now always be remembered as Sookie Stackhouse but here she shows how incredible emotional range she has as an artist. Alison Janney is her death sequence was amazing. It maybe was a 5mintse scene but she sold her death to us and we can now imagine why Lisa was so heartbroken because of her death. J.Smith-Cameron is superb as Lisa's mom. Mark Ruffalo, Matt Damon, John Gallager JR, Kieran Culkin, Rosemarie DeWitt, Jene Rene and Matthew Broderick did a decent job in their respective small yet pivotal roles. In the end Margaret is a nice movie and only flaw it has is its incredibly long without any reason. The movie could have been easily cut into hour and half by eliminating extra scenes or views of New York City.

A truly heart wrenching story, "Margaret" reiterates Kenneth Lonergan's gifts for dialogue, story, and his ability to treat the most dramatic themes with artful humor, awareness and perception. The acting is exceptional; even relatively small parts, (played by actors such as Matthew Broderick, Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, and Allison Janey) showcase both the actors' own remarkable abilities as well as Lonergan's attention to detail. It is Matthew Broderick's character who is the only one to utter the movie's title as he recites a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins. J. Smith Cameron and Anna Paquin, who play mother and daughter, both deliver fierce performances which form the relationship that serves as the backbone of the film. Taking on issues from abortion, divorce, and death to the inherent isolation of being human, the movie has a life and humor to it which cannot be brought down by the weightiness of these issues.

The film is just over two and a half hours long and while it doesn't fly on by--it doesn't slowly crawl on by either. There are a lot of scenes that flow really really nicely into other scenes that might not have to do with the main plot line but seem to belong in the movie all the same. I can kind of see why the writer/director had trouble trimming it even at two and a half hours, its hard to tell where or what to trim since the main plot line of the movie isn't really the point so much as all the establishing things that contribute to Lisa's mood and state of mind as the movie progresses. (i think) If you're reading this you probably already know the main plot line--teenage girl Lisa causes massive bus accident resulting in a single death, and spends the rest of the movie both breaking down emotionally and trying to right what she feels she did wrong. (the accident is really, really not entirely her fault, but she feels enormous guilt just the same as she should) Anna Paquin gives an incredible performance here--i don't just mean that Paguin's performance is really emotional (which it is)--or that she feels like a real life teenager here (so confident in her rightness, so prone to outbursts when her rightness isn't so right) i mean that Paquin's performance really, pretty much completely single-handedly holds this entire jumble together into one coherent narrative--and for that she's almost like Kenneth Lonnigran's equivalent to Ben Gazzara here. We follow her as she runs into all sorts of people, and we follow her thru all of her mood swings and somewhat pointless arguments that she picks with some of these people, and completely well reasoned arguments that she picks with others...she's the kind of well intentioned but guilt racked protaginist you would expect to find in a novel or a play, or maybe a really good ongoing TV series--but definitely not a film with a definitive arc which is what makes her character that much more surprising.

The film really did call to mind some of John Cassavettes' films in both its rambling yet always moving forward (but never exactly straight forward) narrative and the many, many set pieces consisting of minute characters just talking....not to mention all the natrualistic scenes of Lisa just hanging out in her element. (meaning in school, with friends, arguing with her mom, etc) Movie is very very dialog heavy and yet somehow it never comes across as trying to strong-arm you into a specific point of view, at least until the last half hour or so--as its main character eventually and forcefully takes one on of her own.

This is a movie that for all of its strengths has plenty of weaknesses in it as well. For one thing I'm not sure what the heck Jean Reno is doing here exactly. I'm only slightly less curious about what the heck Matt Damon is doing here also. (was he supposed to be Lisa's moral compass? because his character doesn't really make any sense really. If there's one character who seems like he should have had more screen time it would have to be him) i'm not enitrely sure why we keep cutting back to Matthew Broderick who outside the scenes of him moderating English class debates (?!?!) doesn't seem to have much of a character to play. i'm not entirely sure the ending justified the extreme buildup--i'm also not sure how realistic that ending decision actually is either, but i'll let that go just because the movie had to have an ending. Even tho I enjoyed the constant cutting back to Lisa's mom's storyline (J Smith Cameron is pretty good here too i should point out)--i'm not even sure all of that was necessary to tell Lisa's story so thoroughly--even if the relationship between the mom and the daughter i think is supposed to be the backbone of the movie...and yet with all of these questionable elements just kind of thrown on in there one on top of the other, (like they're all so tightly wound together that it would be hard to pick one off without feeling like something was missing i should add)--- the movie does remain really quite watchable right up until the end--anchored very nicely by the excellent work of Anna Paquin so really that's a feat just by itself i think. This is a film that will be overrated by some, and too easily dismissed by many others...yet this definitely is a challenging film and one that i think should make a pretty good civics lesson to some high school/college students in the years ahead--provided schools are still teaching civics in the years ahead.

Margaret is a well written coming of age drama, but the protagonist is not a sympathetic character, which is going to alienate a lot of the audience right off the bat. The girl behind me as I left the theater didn't like it, telling her friend, "I just couldn't stand Anna Paquin's character." The screenplay is deft at shorthanding idiosyncratic, complicated personalities with naturalistic dialogue. It also helps that every role in the film, including almost every minor part, is cast with a top notch actor. But for all the big Hollywood names, my props go to J. Smith-Cameron for a theater-grade performance scaled down to fit the intimacy of a close up shot. The movie explores the milieu of affluent teenagers attending an upscale school in New York City, and one of the other reviewers here is right in saying it resembles a French film in that it takes an mature approach to depicting adolescents, showing them as smart, complicated, sexual, uncertain. Most mainstream reviewers seem puzzled as to what they should think about it. I think it's over their heads, the elliptical, dialogue heavy, character driven narrative style, as well as the lack of an easy, simple take-away moral, seems to have befuddled them. Maybe we should rope in some theater critics' opinions instead.