Margaret

After six years in cinematic and legal limbo, Kenneth Lonergan’s second film finally opened in two small theaters—one in New York and one in LA—with almost no press or studio support behind it. I consider Lonergan’s first feature, 2000’s You Can Count On Me, to be the best movie of the '00s, and Margaret is a flawed masterpiece that is almost one of the greatest films ever made.  It establishes Lonergan as simultaneously the most talented and the most frustrating filmmaker working today.

Margaret is, hands down, the very best film I've ever seen about adolescence. I don’t mean to imply that this is a coming-of-age film about and for young people; this is a challenging film about adolescence that is primarily made for adults. It perfectly captures the frustration, angst, anger, passion, confusion and self-involvement of teenagers, as well as the frustration, anger, love, hate, sacrifice, confusion, hope and hopelessness felt by mothers of teenagers. Setting the film in New York City right after the 9/11 attacks heightens all these distressful feelings, which in turn allows Lonergan to convey more truth about more emotional states than I would have thought possible in a two and a half-hour feature film.  The leads, Anna Paquin and J. Smith-Cameron, deliver performances so raw and pure that it's like watching a wholly new and undiscovered form of acting. You feel the emotions of these women as you watch the layers of the film unfold; from the bus accident that incites the story to the final scene that offers the only answer to life’s eternal questions that art can give—and in my opinion, it is a sufficient answer.

It just kills me that more people will not see this film and that Lonergan, in an attempt to accomplish everything he set out to with this film, wasn’t able to settle for just making one of the best films of all time, and release it properly.  Lonergan was contractually obligated by the film’s financiers to deliver a movie that was no more than two and a half hours but he was unable to bring in a cut under three. What does it say about a filmmaker who can write a script as complex as this, engender performances from actors on this level, capture a city in ways no one has before, convey such profound truth about such powerful emotions, and yet he cannot finish a film properly?  Frustrating does not seem like a sufficient word.

Given the declining state of serious American cinema, I am truly angry that a film this great is not getting seen, and that a filmmaker this talented is not making more films. Lonergan spent something like five years editing this picture and waging legal battles with his distributor and financiers.  When the film was finally released, it seemed like a period piece made for the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, rather than an immediate reaction to it.

I later saw the extended 188-minute cut that Lonergan made as a supplemental feature for the BluRay release, at the same theater where I saw the theatrical cut during its two-week run in New York. Lonergan clearly wanted to pack a lot more into the film than could fit into two hours and thirty minutes, but the longer cut is not a significant improvement on the theatrical cut, and, indeed, much of what appears in the extended version distracts from the film's primary themes. It seems like Lonergan wanted to make not only the very best film about adolescence but about New York too. Ironically, the theatrical cut of Margaret actually is one of the best films about New York I’ve ever seen, but in making this film, it seems Lonergan attempted to stuff every idea he's ever had about the essence of the city into a film that is already overfull of brilliant observations, and it's just too much.

What did all this (perfectionism? stubbornness? impotence?) yield?  The incredible performances have gone largely unseen, unacknowledged and unrewarded, the film is virtually unheard-of save for a handful of critics and a few film buffs like me who shout its virtues to everyone within earshot, and the world has been robbed of any other Lonergan movies that could have been made during the last five years, and perhaps in the future as well—as I assume it will be quite a while before he attempts another movie or is able to get anybody to finance one.

Lonergan belongs in the same league as Orson Welles, both in terms of his amazingly singular talent and his inability to finish what he started.  To my eye, this makes him as tragic a figure as Welles, but fortunately, Lonergan is not dead. He’s still writing terrific plays and eliciting remarkable performances from actors, so perhaps we will get to see more films from him someday.  I sure as hell hope we do, the two pictures he has managed to make represent the very best of this millennium's cinema.  Anyone who cares about movies should seek out You Can Count On Me and Margaret, and watch them over and over again.  There is so much wisdom in these movies. And so much promise.

NOTE: Fortunately, my concerns that this experience would hinder or prevent Lonergan from making more movies were unfounded, and he bounced back quickly with 2016's Oscar-winning MANCHESTER BY THE SEA.