Kenneth Lonergan's new film is about a self-defeating troublemaker. One could argue it's a self-portrait.
The 49-year-old writer-director is best known for his family drama You Can Count On Me. Perhaps made giddy by the universal praise heaped on it, he was incensed when his producers demanded he cut Margaret down from three hours. He refused, which led to two court cases and delayed the film's release by over five years.
The man is seriously deluded: even at 150 minutes, it feels too long. He's also a genius. His witty, generous, multi-stranded epic begins with a bus driver accidentally ploughing into a pedestrian. Precocious, awkwardly flirtatious Manhattan teen Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) isn't sure who, if anyone, is to blame.
Over the coming weeks, that changes. As she picks fights with a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), her mother, the pedestrian's cousin, kids at school and various friendly male teachers (Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick), we find our own feelings in flux.
When a grieving, seen-it-all West Sider calls Lisa a dangerous phoney we feel like cheering. That said, Lisa's desire to make sense of an unnecessary death is increasingly moving.
Lonergan - like John Cassavetes and Pedro Almodóvar - reaches subtle truths via mayhem. It's a bonus that there are so many great parts for women. Paquin, whose squirmy style of acting I've never liked, is astounding here, while J Smith-Cameron (Lonergan's wife) is luminously jangled as Lisa's actress mom. Allison Janney makes impossibly good use of her few minutes of screen time. Jeannie Berlin is a revelation. For all that, Kieran Culkin almost steals the show as a peach-soft stud. So what if a sub-plot involving Jean Reno feels clumsy? So what if some portentous shots of New York's post 9/11 skyline temporarily wreck the mood?
A few years ago the world fell in love with another talky adolescent, Juno MacGuff. Lisa is in many ways the antithesis of Juno. She's not a ray of sunshine. Ever. And when she gets pregnant, she decides against having the baby.
Nevertheless, she's a tremendous character: a rebel in search of a cause, a good girl whose bad behaviour, quite simply, rings true.
Margaret
Cert: 15
