Review of Margaret (2011) by Andrei D — 06 Jul 2012

Like *Rampart*, Woody Harrelson's Dave Brown is a corrupt cop but still doing the right thing but never shows the truth of it. Anna Paquin's Lisa, has almost the same persona and character of Dave Brown, whether she's pretty and smart, she wants to do the right thing as well but as far as everyone knows, she's a bad influence.

*Margaret* believe it or not, there isn't a character named Margaret in this film, but somewhere in the movie, it was told in a classroom on a book reading and that's it is. This is also one of the best movies of 2011 (Wikipedia said it was originally released 3-4 years ago, because of lawsuit, I guess?). Speaking of that, I found myself intrigued and terrified of the story on how it understands and clarifies the American judicial system, and how could a mother-daughter relationship could ruin everyone's live. As usually I said, Paquin's name in this movie is not Margaret, it's Lisa. She has what most young intelligent woman has. After that terrible accident, her life, not just her life, was stumbled into piece by piece as if she wants to gained herself into madness of disrespect. Her mother is more like her, they do have the same characteristic but they don't actually see it. At school, there's Mr. Aaron, who as we thought, Lisa's love interest, and remember, it's her teacher, and there's also a debate in this one class that becomes more of like a religious and political debate that they do at CNN.

What I also noticed here is that all women are facing the same dilemmas in their everyday lives, and the men just sit there and do nothing. The running time is 150 minutes and yet the direction, setup feels it wants more of what it could give than any other movie could show. Paquin deserves to have an Oscar nomination for her breakthrough performance as a self-abused and self-pitied woman.

And for all of this, I think it's one of the most heartbreaking and painful movies to watch.