Margaret (2011)
A young woman witnesses a bus accident, and is caught up in the aftermath, where the question of whether or not it was intentional affects many people's lives.
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good back-story, and good acting
A Disappointing Continuation
It's not great by any means, but it's a pretty good movie that didn't leave me filled with regret for investing time in it.
It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
After hearing of the lawsuit that delayed this film's release for 4 years, I was intrigued. The director claimed to have been granted the final say on the film's cut, but the studio was not having it. Another Alien 3, where studio mettling adversely altered the final product? No, not at all. This is just a very bad film.90% of the scenes are conversations filmed in shot reverse shot. These conversations also retread the same subject matter constantly. The other 10% are shots of the NYC skyline with opera music playing. This is not a viable method to give a vapid movie substance. I watched the 3 hour extended cut, and felt every second of its run time.Also worth mentioning are the two extended cameos by the director where he has meaningless conversations with the protagonist (I saw this as if there was a plot) over the telephone.There is absolutely nothing to be gleaned from watching this. There is no underlying message or any substance to speak of. Avoid it like the plague.
Manhattan teen Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) is a slacker carefree student in Aaron Caije (Matt Damon)'s math class. She tries to ask bus driver Gerald Maretti (Mark Ruffalo) about his cowboy hat. He loses concentration and runs over Monica Patterson. She feels responsible and lies about the traffic light to the police trying to clear the bus driver. Her single mother Joan is a Broadway actress with an admirer in Ramon (Jean Reno). Lisa starts doing drugs, loses her virginity to drug dealer Paul (Kieran Culkin) and fighting with her mother. She contacts Monica's cousin Abigail who is frustrated with the notoriety and sends her to Monica's best friend Emily Morrison. After Gerald's stridden denial, Lisa goes to the police to recant her answers.Anna Paquin's performance is brilliant. Her character goes through so much. The story does meander. There is probably way too many characters and too many plot lines. There is no need for two teachers to be highlighted. Damon and Matthew Broderick should have their characters combined. The mother's story with Ramon should probably be eliminated. The movie is two and a half hour long. It's over-extended. I'm sure a shorter tighter cut would be better.
I made two mistakes - selecting this movie to watch and getting the extended cut, which adds an additional 30 minutes to this already too long movie. This is a movie that should be shown to all aspiring script writers - as an example of what not to do. The average script is 100-120 minutes making a movie about 90-110 minutes long. Perhaps with a revised, tighter script, this could have been something. Taking away the background dialog in many of the scenes would be helpful. We get it that in NYC, it's loud, there are always noises surrounding you. The movie does not suffer from a lack of talent, Matt Damon, Mark Ruffo, Allison Janney, Jean Reno to name a few, it's just their skills are wasted in this movie that drags on and on and on and on and on and on - oh, I should write a shorter review? Good idea. This movie is too long and squanders the talent of its stars. It needs more plot, a clearly defined conflict and resolution. 2 stars for the acting skills cleverly hidden in this movie.
Beautifully written and imaginatively filmed by Kenneth Lonergan, "Margaret" is filled with solipsistic characters obsessed with their hostilities and need to hurt. An impressive Anna Paquin plays Lisa, a New York high school student whose involvement in a fatal bus accident torments her but also allows it to be incorporated into her skewed worldview. It would be easy to condemn Lisa as a privileged, self-righteous teenager except that her world is also being shaped by the people she interacts with who refuse to meet her needs, most notably Emily (Jeannie Berlin), the deceased's best friend, in denial of her own responses; and her mother (J. Smith-Cameron, excellent in a very complex role), an actress starved for attention onstage and off. The cast of supporting characters who exhibit their own self-serving behavior include Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno, Mark Ruffalo, Kieran Culkin and a very fine Matt Damon. Lonergan brings a playwright's precision in both ideas and dialogue to film and, aided by director of photography Ryszard Lenczewski, captures a group of city dwellers so confined in their closed environment that they refuse to believe anything other that what it tells them. (He also plays Lisa's father, removed to the beaches of southern California but still a product of city self-absorption.) Highly recommended.