Margaret

Not that the behind-the-scene details should matter, but there’s been a long and tortured history to Kenneth Lonergan’s second film, Margaret. Shot in 2003, scheduled for release in 2006, this ambitious, pretentious cautionary tale in artistic overreach is only now showing in an arthouse near you. In the intervening eight years, two of Margaret’s producers have died, a fist-full of veteran Hollywood editors have rotated through the project, a breach-of-contract law suit was filed, Martin Scorsese got involved, and rumor has it, Matthew Broderick handed Lonergan a personal loan to finally finish the thing. I hope Broderick doesn’t need that money back any time soon. Margaret is sneaking into theaters without PR or marketing.

Whatever promise the playwright-turned-filmmaker showed in You Can Count On Me, his marvelously understated and exquisitely acted debut, has been lost in his self-indulgent and self-important attempt to make the definitive post-9/11 movie.

Searching for a cowboy hat for her on an impending family vacation out West, teenager Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) spots one atop the head of a city bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) and runs alongside trying to find out where he got it. Distracted and flirting, the driver barrels through a red light and into a woman (Allison Janney), who ends up dying in Lisa’s arms. Not wanting to get Ruffalo in trouble, Lisa lies on the police report but soon finds herself eaten up with guilt. This tests her already troubled relationship with her actress mother (Lonergan’s wife J. Smith-Cameron). Soon she’s seeking out family and friends in Janney’s life, inviting the class stoner (Keiran Culkin) to take her virginity, coming on to her math teacher (Matt Damon), and leading a crusade to legally punish Ruffalo’s character. Meanwhile mom starts dating a Columbian businessman (Jean Reno), dad (Lonergan) neglects her long-distance cries for help, we get glimpses of life inside the New York theater world, and conversations about Shakespeare, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and American foreign policy in the Arab world all make extended appearances.

Oh, and there’s no one named Margaret in the film. (It’s a reference to Hopkins’ Spring and Fall: To a Young Child).

Death, guilt, shame, family, and repentance arm wrestle with the solipsism of youth, as Lonergan tries to react, on both a symbolic and psychological level, to the personal and cultural after-effects of the September 11^th attacks. Unfortunately, the vessel he’s chosen for this examination is a privileged, half-Jewish, Upper West Side teenage girl.

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