Margaret

Lisa Cohen's life is a mess. So is her movie. Titled Margaret due to a refreshing reference, the story of angsty teen Lisa (Anna Paquin) is a sprawling diatribe that tackles a tumultuous mother/daughter relationship, a life-altering accident, the limitations of the justice system, and the challenges of connecting adolescence to adulthood. It explores the epic and illuminates the intimate. Or at least that's the intention. Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan is grasping at big themes here and he desperately, passionately wants to pull the big and the small together to create a singular tapestry of emotions and experiences. His ambition is admirable, but his execution is exaggerated. He's created a sort of melted melodrama, where emotions are elasticized and the hope of true dramatic connection slips through the narrative cracks.

Throughout the movie, Lonergan's scattershot approach locates its highs and lows. He occasionally snags something special, or at least a reflection of such potential, in the form of a good performance, a fresh piece of dialogue, or a sly use of the camera. There are many moments in Margaret that feel authentic, but they're routinely assaulted by an omnipresent artificiality that threatens to expose Lonergan's lack of profundity. This makes for a strange concoction, because the very elements that work one moment are the same pieces that weaken the movie almost simultaneously.

The constant comparative shots of an individual and then a crowd, a towering building and a speck of bird on the horizon, an intimate close-up of a character we know and suddenly a wider shot that captures strangers, are all used to convey Lonergan's message that we all matter, greatly, and yet we're all just tiny little dots scurrying around at the same time. The epic and the intimate. There is society as a whole and there is the individual as well. We're lost in a sea of faces, but we're all something to someone, we're all unique, we're all chained to our emotions and experiences. We're all different, but sort of the same.

It's a fine point to make in the context of the movie, but Lonergan's approach never evolves beyond the obvious imagery. Still, some of these shots are effective. At one point, the camera is tightly focused on the back of Lisa's head as she is about to cross a busy street (the movie takes place in New York, so it's never not busy on the streets, giving Lonergan plenty of people to play with). As Lisa crosses, we walk with her for a moment, then suddenly hold back and quickly lose her in the crowd. We're with her and then we're not. She fills the entire frame and then she's just another moving body.

This shot works nicely, but after a while, Lonergan's overall technique wears thin. There are only so many comparisons of the crowd and the individual that can be recycled over and over again before the point loses all potency. As it turns out, Lonergan doesn't have anything very interesting or unique to say about life big and small, other than that we're all in this together and yet we're going to have to fight our battles alone. Or at least until we can get over ourselves and take comfort in the arms of a loved one. Lonergan is certainly searching for meaning, but his search is just ponderous silliness after a while, running in circles, hoping that some insightful revelation will simply materialize somewhere between the crowd and Lisa.

It doesn't and the problem isn't just Lonergan. The cast contributes to the rocky road that Margaret treads, with certain performances peaking in places and stumbling in others. Paquin is at the centre of it all and she's a confounding mixture of brave talent and utterly strained overacting. Unfortunately, more of the latter, really. She plays an angsty, privileged teen whose life is upended when she both witnesses and sort of contributes to a fatal bus accident. It's not really Lisa's fault, but she saddles the blame and eventually mounts a crusade for justice once the weight of the situation has settled upon her. In addition to this, the accident forces her to re-evaluate her perspective on life, death, sexuality, family, education, tolerance, and everything in between.

So Paquin has her work cut out for her with this role, which means she deserves some mild applause for courageously tackling the challenge. But her performance is still hampered by that faux awkwardness that she's been peddling for years. Lisa trips over her words when she gets flustered, screams at the top of her lungs when she's frustrated, and ultimately spends most of her time occupying either of these categories. Paquin tries to root her performance in raw emotion, but her attempts ring false. We can see the bare mechanics of her performance, the wheels turning as she struggles to communicate the overwhelming changes Lisa is experiencing on screen.

She's very much the lead, so Paquin has the heaviest lifting to do, but the many supporting actors have considerable responsibilities as well and their success is similarly situated somewhere between honest experience and loud, showy fabrication. J. Smith-Cameron fares best, delivering a nervy performance as Lisa's mother, a well-regarded stage actress whose personal life is about one argument away from being a disaster. Smith-Cameron has many big scenes where she gets to dip her toes in the pool of melodrama (during which she, like everyone else, just dives in) and she's a bit over-the-top in places, but hers is the movie's strongest performance.

Jeannie Berlin is the weakest link here, playing a friend of the accident victim. Her scratchy line deliveries and penchant for unhinged outbursts are difficult to endure, because she never manages to fill in her character, instead leaving a transparent caricature on screen. Other supporting players range from lamely lazy (Matt Damon) to blandly watchable (Jean Reno) to inspired goofball (Matthew Broderick). Many more performances fill the sprawling narrative and some of them are even consistently good, though one-note and in roles that are too small to really turn the tide. Even Lonergan himself shows up as Lisa's father and he's pretty decent in a slight role.

What isn't slight is Lonergan's script. Much like the acting, it's all over the place, a mish-mash of meandering subplots and rambling scenes that end abruptly and often without purpose. It's a snapshot of life, but not a convincing, believable one. Captured in fleeting moments, this is life manipulated by someone who so badly wants to say something important that the attempt at reality, while personal and passionate, just ends up feeling forced and hollow. The hurried, clumsy, seemingly random editing glimpses moments that are intriguing and unique and almost touching, but the cuts can't hide the marionette strings that Lonergan is constantly tweaking.

He keeps looking for some deep meaning in the frames, but settles for mostly mediocre acting instead. Even then, Lonergan's overall missteps are not that simple, either. He employs an unusual flow throughout the movie and also leaves room for an intriguing sensation of spontaneity. The actors don't always pick it up and the tiresome juxtaposition of imagery eventually goes stale, but Margaret still refreshes in small pieces. It's just that these pieces get lost in the crowd, swallowed up by the awkward ambition, suffocated by the immobile intimacy.

Margaret's messiness is perhaps the result of its tumultuous trek to the big screen. Shot way back in 2005, the movie took forever to come together when Lonergan couldn't settle on a final cut that he liked. As the post-production period stretched on, legal battles ensued and the original release date in 2007 was left in the dust. Conflict brewed for years before a cut was finally completed to Lonergan's liking and the movie was unceremoniously dumped into scattered theatres in one of the oddest arthouse releases imaginable. From all that chaos, it only makes sense that a mess emerged and so it's still impressive that Lonergan's movie remains entertaining, well-paced, and interesting.

Though there's no point in pretending that the challenges in completing the movie are to blame for all of its flaws. It's possible that the messiness was always there and Lonergan's indecision, lack of vision, and ramshackle script were the instigator for the movie's post-production problems. Who knows! No matter what the reason, we're left with this version of Margaret, a scraggly picture with some good, some bad, and a whole lot in between. Lonergan is trying really hard here, but the result of all his work is that the movie feels jumbled and ineffective. It's impressive in some ways, but mostly for the attempt and not for the execution. It's conventional at times, abstract at others, but it never really finds its place in the midst of these two extremes. The creaky structure and an unearned ending don't help matters. There's so much going on here, enough that I can't write off Margaret completely. It aims high and I can't fault the entire production for its ambition. I just wish the movie was less of a mess. Having a lead who can really sell her dramatic arc wouldn't hurt, either. Margaret screams its emotions so loudly that the attempt is impossible to ignore, but there's another noise competing for attention. It begins quietly and then rises to a roar. That sound is the thud of Lonergan missing his mark.