Margaret

What to make of Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan's wandering epic about a high-school girl? The film was shot in 2007, and not released until 2011, in the meantime having several cuts and instigating several lawsuits.

The DVD version I saw was 150 minutes, a long film, but there is a longer, 186-minute cut that I'm wondering might make the film better, if at least more comprehensible. It's at time brilliant, at times maddening, but never dull.

Anna Paquin stars as Lisa Cohen, a privileged white Jewish kid (in her own words) attending a private school on the Upper West Side. Her mother (J. Smith Cameron) is an actress in a Broadway play. The thread holding the long film together is a bus accident. Lisa, shopping for a cowboy hat, spots a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) with just such a hat. She tries to get his attention, distracting him long enough to run a red light and hit a woman (Allison Janney), severing her leg and killing her.

Paquin tells the police that the light was green, but is tormented by guilt, and retracts her statement. She enlists Janney's friend (Jeannie Berlin) to try to sue the bus company, mostly to get Ruffalo fired. During all this, we see Paquin's struggles with her mother, who is dating a new guy (Jean Reno), and her strong opinions in school, particularly arguing with a girl of Syrian heritage about terrorism.

After watching the film, I felt like I had gotten a crash course on what it's like to live with a teenage girl. I have two sisters, so I remember some of it, but this was intense. Paquin's character is so obnoxious that at times you just want to throttle her. The naivete and idealism of teenagers (I remember it well) is on full display, and the fights with her mother are a good advertisement for birth control.

But at times the film settles into a rapturous joy, mostly the shots of New York City used as interstitial moments. I particularly liked shots of nighttime traffic, or of St. Patrick's cathedral reflected in a high rise. It's as if Lonergan is pulling back from this melodrama to remind us that there's a lot more going on in the world, and that Paquin's character is too myopic. She repeatedly tells her mother she doesn't care about anything, because there's too much suffering in the world. Berlin will later throw these words back in her face, telling her she can't go to pieces every time a dog dies.

The more I think about it, Margaret is really about the eternal battle between old and young. We get some scenes of Matthew Broderick as an English teacher telling a student flatly that he is wrong about a passage of Shakespeare's. Another student says that the world would be better if it were run by teenagers. At times Lonergan seems be saying that wisdom isn't all that it's cracked up to be, but then reverses himself: Paquin maintains that she does not like opera, but the film ends with her in tears at a production of The Tales of Hoffmann.

Paquin is magnetic in the film, playing a character you wouldn't want to really be around but still holds the film together magnificently. There is some evidence of  strange editing: two boys that Paquin is involved in disappear halfway through the film) and as I said, there might be more explanation of why she does the thing she does in a longer cut.

The title, by the way, comes from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, recited by Broderick. Naming things by such obscure references is a theatre kind of thing, and this one could stand another title. Once I knew the main character's name was not Margaret I kept waiting for an explanation of why it was called Margaret. It's a tad pretentious.