In coming to grips with Kenneth Lonergan’s magnum opus "Margaret," one might as well start from its ending, which gives a précis of the grand scale of its emotional and thematic ambitions. It’s set during a performance of Jacques Offenbach’s "The Tales of Hoffmann" at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Up until that point, Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin)—an angst-ridden, headstrong teenager with a rebellious streak—had been resistant to the idea of accompanying her mother (J. Smith Cameron) to the opera. This time, in a particularly vulnerable state, she decided to give it a shot, not expecting much from the experience (especially with her wound-tight mother in tow). But then comes the Barcarolle—that famous ode to love in the night air that opens the third act of Offenbach’s beloved operetta—and something happens to Lisa: tears stream down her face as she gets sucked into the beauty of the moment. She grabs her mother’s hand; soon after, the two embrace, hugging and crying in each other’s arms. Lonergan intercuts shots of random Met audience members, all barely noticing this display, their eyes focused on the stage. This is Lisa and her mother’s private catharsis; it may not mean anything to the world around them, but to these characters, it’s a pure, profound and long-overdue bonding moment.

Aside from this being one of the most moving reconciliations to be seen in an American film in a long time, this concluding sequence also beautifully summarizes the unabashedly operatic style and awesomely wide-ranging substance of "Margaret," Lonergan’s follow-up to his smaller-scale 2001 chamber drama "You Can Count On Me" and a film that tries to do what Austrian Romantic composer Gustav Mahler famously said he attempted to do with his symphonies: “embrace everything.” Life and death; the pits of despair and the heights of ecstasy; reality and art, pre- and post-9/11. Lonergan tries to say something about all of it in this film, and he sure isn’t afraid of messiness and imprecision in doing so. Considering the film’s by-now-famously fraught production history (well summarized here), it’s a miracle it was not only completed (albeit in a slightly truncated form that isn’t exactly what Lonergan had in mind), but that it saw the light of day (though in a terribly small token release that suggested its distributor, Fox Searchlight, was trying to bury it as quietly as possible). It’s even more of a miracle that the film turns out to be as successful as it is. Whatever the form, "Margaret" is a considerable work.

Here is a film that is not content to simply tell a straightforward story of a teenager dealing with the traumatic after-effects of witnessing a woman perish right in her arms as the result of a traffic accident she herself inadvertently caused. Lonergan, instead, blows his narrative up into a complex, nervy portrait of an adolescent not only coming to grips with this particular death, but also with everything in the adult world she has yet to fully grasp. Broadly speaking, Lisa’s angst-filled journey toward some kind of personal redemption touches on matters of ethics, morality, class differences and even art; more specifically, she comes up against moral gray areas and emotional complexities that can’t help but confound her sheltered upper-class existence and her increasingly spiraling-out-of-control sense of right and wrong. "Margaret" isn’t just meant to be universal in scope, however; Lonergan, for instance, includes earnest classroom-discussion scenes in which students often heatedly discuss worldly post-9/11 implications, suggesting he wants his tale to be clearly situated in a topical context.

All of that is enough to fuel two or three films’ worth of drama; that Lonergan tries to cram it all into this one means "Margaret" occasionally comes off somewhat unwieldy. But, even at its most incoherent, Lonergan has genuine insights into human nature to back up his ambitions. "Margaret" is, in part, about the ways we all see ourselves as the stars of our own personal dramas, to the point that good intentions sometimes can shade dangerously into self-involvement. During the film’s last hour, Lisa gets caught up in the U.S. legal system when she tries to help the accident victim’s best friend, Emily (Jeannie Berlin), sue the MTA for negligence—but is she doing it out of pure altruism, or is this just a cover for a pained attempt to assuage her own guilty conscience? Lonergan wisely allows both possibilities to hang in the air; "Margaret" freely swims in the complexities of character, and the film is all the richer for it.

What ultimately dazzles about "Margaret" is an overriding sense of a film borne out of what feels like bitter experience on the part of its maker—a work that feels torn, bleeding, from Lonergan’s heart. And that, among other reasons, is why its ending is as emotionally soaring as it is. Even after all that Lisa has gone through in the course of this particularly exhausting period of time, she has the power to respond passionately to even something as seemingly unrelated to her current circumstances as "The Tales of Hoffmann"—and, considering how much we in the audience have been privy to regarding her emotional struggles, we find ourselves thoroughly understanding the experience that informs her reaction. It’s unavoidable that everyone brings their own personal baggage to the way he/she responds to a work of art; more than any other film I can think of, "Margaret" vividly conveys the process by which one individual develops the kind of life experience that can’t help but affect one’s own perspective on art. That is not a small thing for a film to accomplish; the fact that this is merely the least of the film’s accomplishments is proof that "Margaret," warts and all, is a film to value and treasure.

Review by:
Kenji Fujishima