Margaret (Lonergan, 2011): Prince Charles Cinema, 7.50pm
This film was famously buried by Fox studios and there was just one late
press screening in Britain.
I wrote about the tortured pre-release history here.
But Kenneth
Lonergan's follow up to the excellent You Can Count On Me gained a
second life thanks to critics enthused by one of the best American film
in recent years championing this superb movie.
Here the film screens in the full extended version.
This is Peter Bradshaw's review from the Guardian to the time of release:
Since 2000, when he made his mark with a tremendous debut, You Can Count
on Me, Kenneth Lonergan has been absent from the radar as a
director. The reason turns out to have been years of acrimonious studio
argument over the length of his followup project, a post-9/11 New York
drama in a world of trauma, rage, blame, overtalking and interrupting.
Originally conceived as a three-hour movie, it has been allowed into
cinemas in a two-and-a-half hour cut. Perhaps Lonergan is content with this and perhaps not, but
the resulting movie is stunning: provocative and brilliant, a sprawling
neurotic nightmare of urban catastrophe, with something of John
Cassavetes and Tom Wolfe, and rocket-fuelled by a superbly thin-skinned
performance by Anna Paquin. Its sheer energy and dramatic vehemence,
alongside that raw lead performance, puts it way ahead of more
tastefully formed dramas. Paquin plays Lisa, the daughter
of divorced parents: a mouthy, smart-but-not-that-smart teen at private
school, sexy but emotionally naive, self-absorbed and scarily
hyper-articulate in the language of entitlement and grievance. She may
have inherited drama-queen tendencies from her mother Joan (J
Smith-Cameron), a Broadway stage star, with whom she lives in New York.
One day, after an encounter of pouting defiance with her exasperated
mathematics teacher (Matt Damon), Lisa takes it into her head to buy a
cowboy hat. She sees a bus driver wearing one she likes: he is played by
Mark Ruffalo.
With a teenager's heedless disregard for the consequences, she
flirtatiously runs alongside his bus, waving wildly, asking where he got
it. He smiles back at her, taking his eyes off the road – with terrible
results. Lisa is overwhelmed with ambiguous emotion at
having contributed to a disaster and then participated in a coverup,
and, compulsively driven to do something, draws everyone into a
whirlpool of painful and destructive confrontations. But is that emotion
guilt or righteousness? Or a sociopathic convulsion, a need to create a
huge redemptive drama with herself at the centre, to lash out against
her mother and the entire adult world; or to enact vengeance against a
man who, without trying, has placed her in a position of weakness – at
the very point at which she considers she should be attaining her adult,
queen-bee status? Paquin creates that rarest of things: a profoundly
unsympathetic character who is mysteriously, mesmerically, operatically
compelling to watch.
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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