Margaret (2011)

This film was put together very well for the most part, but at the same time it is very uneven. The biggest knock on it is the main character, Lisa, who is very unlikeable. She is the main cause for the accident at the beginning, yet she goes on a crusade thru most of the film, trying to get the bus driver, who ran over the woman, fired. But she caused the guy to get distracted in the first place, so the audience is supposed to jump on board her quest for justice? I wasn't buying that. Again, she caused the accident. And you can't buy into her developing friendship with the woman who's good friend was the one one who was killed, as they get together to sue the city of New York over the accident. The film was shot and directed well though, it holds your interest. But again, to me, the character of Lisa, comes across as a snot-nosed, manipulative, spoiled, teenager, which damaged what could have been a great film.

Over two hours of rights and wrongs... my personal experience is that I didn´t check my watch for about two hours and when the credits rolled I stayed put. It´s hypnotic how it sustains a relentless pace for that long. It´s many things at once: a moral dilemma, a growing process, a mother-daughter relationship... and more. Everything accumulates with a plausible chaos similar to real life nonsense. In that aspect the script seems to have been written on its own. Things happen and we react. That makes any off-putting scene easily forgivable because characters seriously come to life and reactions and interactions seem inevitable. It focuses entirely on Lisa, a well-intentioned, educated, confused and pretentious teenager. The rest of an impressive cast only exist in relation to her and there are unexpected small parts played by big names that support this project´s epic ambitions. This is the first film I´ve seen that takes full advantage of Anna Paquin´s talent for over-acting. Her character is a turmoil of emotions and she doesn´t hold back. She´s often unfair, judgmental, self-centered and over-dramatic but those traits ring true to the character. Paquin shows her struggle to develop as a person, her will to do the right thing and be the best she can be. She makes her character believable and ultimately likable.What I didn´t like were the dialogues, constantly using big words for the sake of it and over-explaining emotions. If Lisa was the only character to fall into that I´d be ok with it, but she´s not. That makes different characters seem deranged in the exact same way. Emily´s scenes lose a lot of credibility because of that. Then there´s the accident which inspires the whole "moral gimnasium". It isn´t intricate enough to sustain the epic conflict of interests it aims for. What we get is a whole lot of legal mumbo-jumbo. It´s unbalanced the way it insists on some points while leaving others almost untouched. Lisa´s guilt should have been explored further since she had such a big part on the accident. I´m guessing the film suffered enormously from the nightmarish editing process I only learned about later. The chaos kind of gets out of control at some point and the epic it looks for gets lost, absurd, even. I can understand how it was supposed to be an even longer film but I don´t see how including details about her abortion would have improved upon the dilemma.Again, lots of rights and wrongs, it depends which part you choose to stay with. It´s a pitty because the ending is effective and the overall experience is rich, despite its many flaws.

This is a film about Lisa, a 19 year old spoiled girl living in Upper West side Manhattan, going to a private school. This is the sort of school where a teacher coming across Lisa and a friend smoking a joint in the park, just tells them off and walks on. They call him by his first name and mimic him. Lisa purposely distracts a bus driver because she likes his cowboy hat, he goes through a red light and kills a woman pedestrian who dies in Lisa's arms. They both say the light was green. She feels guilt. This story is about a moral dilemma (does it matter that she lied, as the woman is dead and the bus driver will lose his job). Her mother is an actress, her father lives in California. They profess concern but don't offer much guidance. The other issue is communication, Lisa's family don't communicate, her friends don't. The film is clunky - ie what is Lisa's mother's new boyfriend's job? 'I help pc's that can't communicate.' Clunk. She has meaningless sex but rebukes a boy who really likes her. He says she's putting him off because love scares her - clunk. There are mad subplots - the mother's affair with a man who loves opera, the cringy scene between the acting class, telling each other home truths, her meaningless sex with a classmate (do you want to come over and deflower me?) The crazy lawsuit against the bus company makes no sense and introduces yet more side characters - two different lawyers, family members etc, who then leave the story. Really just too bonkers to be enjoyable. Anna Paquin overacts - Matt Damon and Mark Ruffalo try to calm her performance but it's too rabid. The mother is the best of the lot.

Beautifully written and imaginatively filmed by Kenneth Lonergan, "Margaret" is filled with solipsistic characters obsessed with their hostilities and need to hurt. An impressive Anna Paquin plays Lisa, a New York high school student whose involvement in a fatal bus accident torments her but also allows it to be incorporated into her skewed worldview. It would be easy to condemn Lisa as a privileged, self-righteous teenager except that her world is also being shaped by the people she interacts with who refuse to meet her needs, most notably Emily (Jeannie Berlin), the deceased's best friend, in denial of her own responses; and her mother (J. Smith-Cameron, excellent in a very complex role), an actress starved for attention onstage and off. The cast of supporting characters who exhibit their own self-serving behavior include Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno, Mark Ruffalo, Kieran Culkin and a very fine Matt Damon. Lonergan brings a playwright's precision in both ideas and dialogue to film and, aided by director of photography Ryszard Lenczewski, captures a group of city dwellers so confined in their closed environment that they refuse to believe anything other that what it tells them. (He also plays Lisa's father, removed to the beaches of southern California but still a product of city self-absorption.) Highly recommended.