How do you solve a problem like Margaret? With Martin Scorsese’s editing skills and a million-dollar hand-out from Matthew Broderick, apparently. Writer and director Kenneth Lonergan’s troubled production began in 2005, but an inability to edit the film down from Lonergan’s desired four-hour run time ensured that two lawsuits and seven years later, this laboured drama still feels like a work-in-progress – a complex and occasionally brilliant screenplay in dire need of some cohesion.
Ostensibly, Margaret tells the tale of Lisa (Anna Paquin), a bratty New York high-schooler who inadvertently plays a significant role in a fatal bus crash and becomes obsessed with setting it right. But taking its title from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ ode to a young woman’s fall from innocence ‘Spring And Fall’, and constantly referring to opera, Margaret becomes a weighty, intellectual and abstract exploration of a teenager’s narcissism in post-9/11 New York.
Paquin puts in a remarkably brave performance, in that she never shies away from making Lisa utterly insufferable. Obnoxious, affected and completely self-obsessed, watching her swear at her mother, flirt with her teachers and engage in passionate but ignorant classroom debates about Iraq holds the same morbid appeal as watching the bus crash. As teasing slow-motion shots and a dramatic score evoke Lisa’s theatricality, there’s something painfully fascinating about her belief that she is the omnipotent puppet master in the drama of her life.
Unfortunately, Lonergan clearly didn’t feel the same sense of control over his stage. A mass of superfluous characters and payoff-free subplot scenes aimlessly float in a connection-free vacuum, divorced from the bigger picture. As brilliantly-written scenes and fantastic performances from bus driver Mark Buffalo, teacher Matt Damon and the angrily bereaved Jeannie Berlin remain isolated, simply refusing to come together as a whole, Margaret becomes a frustrating, thought-provoking and very pretty mess.
In one very funny (but again, completely tangential) scene, teacher Matthew Broderick argues at length with a student over a Shakespeare quote, showing that though we can appreciate artists, we can still scramble to decipher the true meaning of their work. With Margaret, there’s much to admire, but one gets the feeling that Lonergan is scrambling too.