Margaret
Director: Kenneth Lonergan
USA
Shot in 2005, this film was left on the shelf of the distributor and swung round between various interested parties for many years. Director Kenneth Lonergan, whose debut feature, You Can Count on Me, is a true contemporary masterpiece of independent cinema and immediately preceded Margaret, went to great lengths to bring his project to the screen and eventually relented to produce a version far shorter than his original vision. The distributors, for their part, were not entirely satisfied with the final product, a full 150 minutes long, but this version has now finally made it to the festival circuit and Karlovy Vary is a great platform to test this version.
Margaret is, if not a brilliant piece of cinema, at least another affirmation of Lonergan’s talent as a screenwriter and artist of human emotions. His films take rather difficult subject matter and thoroughly investigate the human components of the story in intimate collaboration with extremely gifted actors.Margaret reunites him with Mark Ruffalo and Kieran Culkin from You Can Count on Me, but the performances he elicits from Anna Paquin, J Smith-Cameron and Allison Janney, in the latter’s only scene in the film, are breathtaking.
The film uses the anger in the face of September 11 as a backdrop to a bus accident that Paquin is responsible for when she waves at a bus driver and he runs over a woman on the street, killing her almost instantly. The teenager Paquin is from a broken home and is exploring her rebellious side, not unaware of her sexuality. Over the course of the film, she steamrolls many men in her life, and many women, including her mother, are also terribly hurt.
A good companion piece to The Squid and the Whale, Margaret has an arrogant young protagonist who is immature even as she verbally abuses many people around her, breaking hearts and testing their patience. It’s not always easy to watch, but Lonergan finds raw emotion in the everyday details of New York City that are dark but not without hope.
The title refers to a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Read a complete review of this film in the upcoming edition of The Prague Post, July 4.
(Thanks to :http://www.praguepost.com)
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