Review of Margaret (2011) by David S — 17 Aug 2012

At one point in "Margaret" a high school lit student makes the observation that sometimes Shakespeare wrote characters from viewpoints he didn't necessarily agree with. Then, in the words of 17-year-old Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin), another "spoiled, liberal Jew" in the class argues that in "King Lear", when he wrote "As flies to wanton boys, are we to the gods / They kill us for their sport" the author wasn't questioning man's place in the universe. Is it so unthinkable that a white bread NYC teacher (Matthew Broderick) and a thousand French scholars' views be wrong? Maybe Shakespeare wasn't questioning man -- he was questioning the gods.

This isn't the beginning or the end. It's just another puzzle piece in the rambling, messy, doomed-too-early masterpiece that is writer-director Kenneth Lonergan's "Margaret", filmed in 2005 and only barely released last year in a studio-approved 150-minute cut, opposing Lonergan's desired three hours. Better late than never. Missing this altogether would be a nightmare for anyone who dreams in movies, or even sweeping storytelling. "Margaret", for all its flaws, is saved by an explosive ambition not to turn away when the picture gets murky and the message gets difficult. And Paquin gives one of the best performances of (technically) 2011, as the emotionally-wracked Lisa, a bitchy, begrudging tease of a private school student who accidentally bears witness to a deadly bus crash.

It's hard to say more about "Margaret", since it goes so many places and deals with so many things. And I know, sometimes ambition alone doesn't cut it. But see it and tell me you can't respect how big this movie expands. It was one death, and it's one girl. In a city that can take blood from a stone, what's Lisa but a fly to the gods? What's a collision victim, for that matter? Like free sex, it's just death, and life goes on. Lonergan bills Lisa at the heart of an opera of things lost in the fire, where help becomes obsession, real becomes fake, becomes a moral gymnasium. This is the kind of movie that could fill up a thousand term papers. Shakespeare may be a reach of a relation, but say this about he and Lonergan: they each understand there's dimensions to those they leave behind.