Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan) [115 points/11 votes]
"Perhaps the time for a properly considered assessment of Margaret will come with its upcoming home-video release -— away from its fraught production history, away from the bitter legal issues still surrounding the film, away from Fox Searchlight’s attempts to quietly bury it with an extremely limited token release, away from the #teammargaret cause that sprouted up on Twitter to get more film critics to be able to see it and champion it. Home video may be the only way that the many outside of certain major film cites who have merely heard about Kenneth Lonergan’s sophomore film maudit will finally get to see it for themselves, and perhaps by then the hoopla will have died down enough for the film to be considered on its own terms. Who knows? Maybe, by the time it does get a home-video release, we will all be able to see it in a form closer to Lonergan’s original intentions.
Even in the unabashedly messy 150-minute theatrical version that inspired all that ink to be spilled for and against it, however, Margaret remains, to these eyes, a considerable achievement: a work of enormous thematic ambition that adds up to more than the sum of its often-impressive parts and is a deeply moving experience besides.
Here is a film that is not content to simply tell a straightforward story of a teenager, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin, in a majestic performance), dealing with the traumatic after-effects of witnessing a woman perish right in her arms as the result of a traffic accident she inadvertently helped cause. Lonergan, instead, blows his narrative up into a complex portrait of an adolescent not only coming to grips with this particular death but also with everything in the adult world she has yet to fully grasp. Broadly speaking, Lisa’s angst-filled journey toward some kind of personal redemption touches on matters of ethics, morality, class differences and even art; unavoidably, she comes up against moral gray areas and emotional complexities that can’t help but confound her sheltered upper-class existence and her increasingly spiraling-out-of-control sense of right and wrong. Margaret isn’t just meant to be universal in scope, however; Lonergan, for instance, includes earnest classroom-discussion scenes in which students often heatedly discuss worldly post-9/11 implications, suggesting he wants his tale to be clearly situated in a topical context.
All of that is enough to fuel two or three films’ worth of drama; that Lonergan tries to cram it all into this one means Margaret sometimes admittedly comes off messy and unwieldy. But, even at its least coherent, Lonergan has genuine insights into human nature to back up his ambitions. Margaret is, in part, about the ways we all see ourselves as the stars of our own personal dramas, to the point that good intentions sometimes can shade dangerously into self-involvement. During the film’s last hour, Lisa gets caught up in the U.S. legal system when she tries to help the accident victim’s best friend, Emily (Jeannie Berlin), sue the MTA for negligence -— but is she doing it out of pure altruism, or is this just a cover for a pained attempt to assuage her own guilty conscience? Lonergan wisely allows both possibilities to hang in the air; his film freely swims in the complexities of character, and the film is all the richer for it.
What ultimately dazzles about Margaret is an overriding sense of a film borne out of what feels like bitter experience on the part of its maker — a work that feels torn, bleeding, from Lonergan’s heart. And that, among other reasons, is why its ending is as emotionally soaring as it is. Set during a live Metropolitan Opera performance of Jacques Offenbach’s operetta The Tales of Hoffman, it depicts a catharsis for both Lisa and her mother that may not mean anything to the many opera-goers surrounding them but certainly mean the world to them both and to us as well. Even after all that Lisa has gone through in the course of this particularly exhausting period of time, she has the power to respond passionately to even something as seemingly unrelated to her current circumstances as The Tales of Hoffman —- and, considering how much we in the audience have been privy to regarding her emotional struggles, we find ourselves thoroughly understanding the experience that informs her passionate reaction. It’s unavoidable that everyone brings their own personal baggage to the way he/she responds to a work of art; more than any other film I can think of, Margaret vividly conveys the process by which one individual develops the kind of life experience that can’t help but affect one’s own perspective on art. That is not a small thing for a film to accomplish; the fact that this is merely the least of the film’s accomplishments is proof that Margaret, warts and all, is a film to value and treasure." - Kenji Fujishima
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