MARGARET written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, with Anna Paquin and Jeannie Berlin. 149 minutes. A Fox SearchLight release. Opens Friday (October 7). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NNNN
Wondering where Kenneth Lonergan’s been since his 2000 release You Can Count On Me? Mystery solved. He’s been working on his hugely ambitious follow-up, Margaret.
This emotionally intense drama could have been a mess. Lonergan takes on mother-daughter relationships, post-9/11 angst (there are lots of shots of planes and the New York City skyline), moral accountability and a whack of other stuff.
But thanks to a spectacular anchoring performance by Anna Paquin and Lonergan’s trademark acute observational skill, Margaret is intelligent, absorbing and fully worthy of its lengthy running time.
Paquin plays private school student Lisa, a reactive bundle of emotions whose alienation deepens when she’s involved in – in fact, may have caused – a bus accident, and the victim, Monica, dies in her arms. Then she lies to the police about it.
Lonergan’s narrative centres on Lisa’s attempts to take responsibility for her actions after the traumatic event. She contacts Monica’s best friend, Emily (the superb Jeannie Berlin), tries to make good with Monica’s only family contact and attempts to make the driver (Mark Ruffalo) pay for his carelessness.
But in Lonergan’s universe, you always get more than you bargained for.
That goes for the hapless teachers at Lisa’s private school – Matt Damon as the good-guy math teacher who gets in too deep with Lisa, and Matthew Broderick as an English teacher intellectually bested by the kids. In Margaret, the classroom is the metaphor for class conflict and Middle East tensions, a place where authority is impotent.
The film, named after the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem Broderick’s character reads in class, is alive with hyper-naturalism. The scene where Lisa loses her virginity to the school stoner (Kieran Culkin in a familiar role) is so real it’s scary. And sequences in which she outrages her mother (J. Smith-Cameron) seem to have been culled from somebody’s real-life kitchen.
But Lonergan’s brainy script wouldn’t work without Paquin (shot in 2005, when she could still play a teenager), who makes Lisa a force of nature. As a walking paradox – both controlling and completely out of control – she’s riveting.
That Oscar was no fluke.
susanc@nowtoronto.com
