film CITYARTS
Their Own Private 9/11 Margaret’s DVD and dust bunnies rescue the elite By Armond White
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dvance word on the DVD release of Kenneth Lonergan’s film Margaret hailed it as a “masterpiece,” yet no one calls it a good movie because it isn’t even that— it’s the latest event from our era’s perverse herd mentality. A group of media cronies with similar interests and goals have rallied around Margaret, which Lonergan filmed in 2005 but was shelved for legal reasons. Lonergan failed to meet the distributor’s established running time (he refused to alter his three-hour-plus director’s cut), eventually enlisting Martin Scorsese’s help in re-editing the excessive footage to a contractual length. That remedy is ironic, since Scorsese has been unable to deliver a good or brief film of his own for more than a decade now (at least since he hired Lonergan to do rewrites on the overweening Gangs of New York). And Margaret suffers many of the same excesses as recent Scorsese, primarily its
unfocused story of Upper West Side New York private school student Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) who witnesses a fatal bus accident then laboriously seeks to have the driver (Mark Ruffalo) sued, fired, penalized or punished. This plot suggests ethical conflict, as in the recent Iranian tug-of-war A Separation, but Lonergan structures Margaret like HBO miniseries episodes; a scandal and monologue every 15 minutes. He neglects Lisa’s moral sense while stumbling over the very issues and situations he devised. He turns Margaret (the title is from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “Spring and Fall to a Young Child,” the first of several high-toned references) into a presumptuous allegory for 9/11 fear and guilt. In one sense, the movie never recovers from its early symbolic image of bloody public disaster. The clumsily staged gore is not as damaging as Lonergan’s calamitous concept; he inexpertly combines Lisa’s naiveté and arrogance with on-the-street happenstance and theatrical overstatement. The avid Paquin is like Jean Simmons reborn but she’s set opposite broad, hysterical deathbed acting by Allison Janney—Actors Studio terrorism. Lonergan’s gang of New York media
friends indulge Margaret’s self-aggrandizing dramatization of a simple urban event without a perspective that supplies moral accounting— the triumph of Todd Solondz’s underappreciated, more authentic 9/11 film Life During Anna Paquin as an UWS brat in Margaret. Wartime. Lisa is as selfish, proscenium blocking of the opening pupilneurotic and vengeful as the people she teacher seduction or the inexplicably “big” annoys in her quest: her distant divorced moments given to each actor (only Berlin’s father (played by Lonergan); self-involved first appearance, a comic/ironic eulogy at a actress-mother (J. Smith-Cameron), who memorial service, has successful subtext). teases an anti-Jewish European bigotPlus, Lonergan breaks my one cinematic lothario (Jean Reno); an inveigled instructor rule: No movie over two hours should use (Matt Damon); and a vindictive Manhattan slow-motion. Margaret has many pointmatron (Jeannie Berlin). Margaret’s crusadlessly palsied shots of New Yorkers trudging ers recognize themselves in these denizens, along crowded sidewalks. (Trudging? In which makes the movie no different from Manhattan? Cliché!) other solipsistic indie movie conceits. One could read Lonergan’s vain, mawkish Lonergan lacks the cinematic skill to ending, which omits the bus driver’s agony, convey a credible feeling of New York living as the ultimate dismissal of the working (the richest element of Oliver Stone’s great class by the liberal, opera-going middle 9/11 epic World Trade Center). His playclass. Margaret should have been re-titled wright’s habits restrict every scene to an It’s All About Me. actor’s showcase, whether in his obvious