Smith Cameron and Anna Paquin, who play mother and daughter, both deliver fierce performances which form the relationship that serves as the backbone of the film. Taking on issues from abortion, divorce, and death to the inherent isolation of being human, the movie has a life and humor to it which cannot be brought down by the weightiness of these issues.

other recent film. So much of what makes us human is articulated in the movie that everything is real, everything is believable, and one can't help but to be moved to tears, to laughter, and back again. Margaret is a perfect follow up to Lonergan's superb first film You Can Count on Me.

editing glitches become secondary background noise in a compelling film. The title no one in the film is named Margaret references the Gerald Manley Hopkins poem 'Spring and Fall: to a young child' which is quoted at the top of this review.MARGARET focuses on a 17-year-old New York City high-school student Lisa Anna Paquin who feels certain that she inadvertently played a role in a traffic accident that has claimed a woman's life, Monica Allison Janney : Lisa was chasing a bus whose driver Maretti Mark Ruffalo ran a red light because of Lisa's distraction trying to discover where the Maretti bought his cowboy hat. Monica dies in Lisa's arms while asking for her daughter also named Lisa we later learn Monica's daughter died at age 12 from leukemia . Lisa at first feels sorry for Maretti, thinking that if she tells the truth Maretti will loose his job and his family support. Lisa's actress mother Joan J. Smith-Cameron encourages her to not give accurate testimony to the police, a decision Lisa follows and spends the rest of the film regretting, and in making attempts to set things right she meets with opposition at every step. Torn apart with frustration, she begins emotionally brutalizing her family, her friends, her teachers, and most of all, herself. She has been confronted quite unexpectedly with a basic truth: that her youthful ideals are on a collision course against the realities and compromises of the adult world.The world that Lisa occupies includes teachers - played by Matt Damon who crosses a forbidden line when Lisa seeks his advice as the only truly adult man she knows, Matthew Broderick whose class discussions over literature are brittle and acerbic and deeply disturbing - her introduction to adolescent needs and physical incidents at the hands of John Gallagher, Jr. now of The Newsroom fame , Paul Kieran Culkin - her relationship with her needy single mother Joan whose newly dating Ramon Jean Reno , her contact with the deceased's friend Emily Jeannie Berlin - brilliant , and the deceased's only family - all in an attempt to somehow set things right but Lisa admitting that she is as responsible for Monica's death as is Maretti. But the world outside can't cope with anything but financial compensation as the resolution to Lisa's angst.There are many other characters brought to life by some VERY fine actors and the stunning musical score by Nico Muhly includes moments at the Metropolitan Opera where we actually get to see and hear Christine Goerke as Bellini's Norma singing 'Casta Diva' and Renée Fleming and Susan Graham singing the Barcarolle from Offenbach's Tales of Hoffman, allowing the opening and closing of the film to be accompanied by a quiet guitar piece, as well as proving Muhly's very highly accomplished music to underscore the moods of the film. The cinematography by Ryszard Lenczewski underlines the tension - form the imagery of slow motion crowd movement in New York during the opening sequences to the stabilization of important encounters between the characters. A lot is said and screamed and the level of communication and actions by Anna Paquin's Lisa alienate the audience at times, but the film makes some very solid statements about how we are acidly interacting or not connecting in our current state of society. That deserves attention. The film requires a lot form the audience, but in this viewer's mind it is well worth the time. Grady Harp

defining her young adulthood just as she defined herself in childhood with The Piano , who inadvertently causes a fatal road accident. What follows is the emotional aftermath, fought outwardly with her mother, as a moral and ethical war wages within her hormone-ravaged body.The performances are excellent throughout, particularly Paquin and J. Smith-Cameron as the daughter and mother caught in gravitational flux. Jean Reno gives fine support as the sad-sack Ramon, while Matthew Broderick delivers the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins that provides the film's title, while suggesting the entire life of his character by the way he eats a sandwich. It's that kind of film. I recently wrote a review of Winter's Bone, which I described as an anti-youth movie. Margaret could be a companion piece in this regard, cautioning against the bright-eyed naivety of youthful independence, and promoting the importance of family. Like Winter's Ree, Lisa is a lost soul; unlike Ree, Lisa is not someone we admire. But she is always in focus; Lonergan expects not for us to like her, only to understand her. In maintaining this focus, Lonergan himself achieves the admirable: weaving a narrative whose minute details and labyrinthine arguments mirror the broader existential vista against which they are dwarfed. Margaret goes deeper than Winter's Bone, delivering something pleasingly unexpected: a kind of Sartrean modern fable about the isolating nature of subjectivity. Like her actor mother on the stage, and like us all in our semi-waking lives, Lisa is the main player in her great opera. She performs the social functions that enable her to cling to a sense of belongingness, but something gnaws at her soul. And when, after the accident, she seeks some kind of meaning, she is met at once by indifference, before being seduced by those very institutions that make indifference normal. Nothing in the material world satisfies Lisa; nothing can match her aspirations. The suggestion here, I feel, is that our despair emerges from the disparity between that which we hope for and that which reality can deliver. No wonder it took so long to find its way to a single UK screen: a three-hour existentialist play is a tough sell. Ten years after the towers sank to Ground Zero, Margaret joins There Will Be Blood, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, and for some Zodiac in the pantheon of modern classics that map the American psyche in the post-9/11 world.

seen. All aspiring screenwriters should be forced to watch this movie and then be given a 3-hour oral and written exam before being allowed to put pen to paper or finger to keyboard .The acting is also superb. The feel is more of a stage play, an ensemble piece, than a film. Perhaps the fact that one of the characters - Lisa's mother - is a stage actress struggling to support her daughter is partially responsible. But you can tell that this team of seasoned actors relished the opportunity to stretch out with an intelligent well-written script and a supportive director.The only flaw in Margaret has already been well expressed by others. The film does meander and, while I recognize that this is partly the point of the exercise, there are times at which you long for a more conventional, and taut, storyline. I would gladly have spent more time in the company of these well-drawn, articulate and interesting people. Maybe next time HBO wants to do a miniseries it will let Kenneth Lonergan loose on a story rather than subject us to another preachy, wordy effort from Aaron Sorkin.

characters feel real and authentic. If you're looking for a light, generic popcorn movie, this film is not for you. But if you appreciate true to life drama with weightier themes that will challenge your preconceptions and stimulate your higher cognitive functions, Margaret is definitely worth watching.An early scene, of the story's tragic inciting incident, was so brutal, so powerful, and so upsetting that I almost had to leave the theater. The main character's involvement in this scene means that she is forever changed, and it's to be expected that she will begin to "act out" as she struggles to recalibrate her life in tragedy's wake. You might not like, or agree with, everything she does, but she is fascinating to watch. Peter Travers of Rolling Stone sums it up best: "Margaret, for all its flaws, is a film of rare beauty and shocking gravity."

math teacher, Mr. Aaron Matt Damon , chastises her for her poor grades. But with a slightly flirtatious tone, Lisa settles the matter with a supposedly shared understanding that it's okay because math won't factor into her future.Later, Lisa sets out to find a stylish but functional cowboy hat in the middle of New York City. She is unsuccessful until she spies one on the head of a boyishly handsome bus driver Mark Ruffalo and jauntily jogs beside it determined to get his attention to both: find out where he got his hat; and also to quench a teenage girl's desire of just getting his attention. She succeeds; he drives through a red light, and kills a pedestrian in the process.Lisa immediately feels the pain, guilt and remorse and tries to ease the woman's passage into the afterlife. The film then becomes a character study of a teenage girl determined to get past the pain and aftermath of a tragedy caused by a simple accident. The fascinating parts of this film involve how our lead character becomes less sympathetic but more fragile while remaining equally reckless.Questions about the cause and nature of mortality are raised, and most interestingly what are the moral and immoral ways to respond to it. The film's title comes from the poem "Spring and Fall: Margaret, Are You Grieving? " written by Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1880. Margaret is a child who must come to terms with the loss of her innocence. "Â… And yet you will weep and know why. Now no matter, child, the name; Sorrow's springs are the same." Lisa's English teacher Matthew Broderick recites this poem to the class. Lisa is, at times, a typical teenager, bent on having things her way, always having her point heard. But now the shaky foundations which her arrogance is based on begin to crumble and we don't know and she doesn't know if she's still innocent or where she lost it.The shortened released version of "Margaret" clocks in at over two and a half hours; edited down from the three-hour director's cut. But because of the universal tale of life and death that it tells, it needs the length. It doesn't have a simple plot, and Lisa is not a simple character. It can definitely seem errant with its uneven editing, but that's probably going to be an expected outcome of 6 years' worth of legal and creative battles going on behind the scenes.Broderick and Ruffalo re-team from Lonergan's previous indie success "You Can Count on Me" 2000 , but don't expect any actor to show more range or emotion than Anna Paquin. Everything goes through Lisa.

burning desire for justice. But along the way she makes her own compromises, and her victory, if that's what it is, is both hard-won and deeply equivocal.This film shares with director Kenneth Lonergan's previous film, You Can Count on Me, a gentle and amused but unflinching view of human nature. The vision here, though, is much darker. The film tends to proceed on the assumption that conflict in human relationships must erupt sooner or later in confrontation, and this results in a film with a somewhat episodic structure and rather a lot of shouting matches. The film nevertheless wins our trust by caring enough not to fob us off with easy answers or easy cynicism. It does not even give us a particularly sympathetic heroine to identify with, only a flawed human being who will have to come to terms with her mistakes like everyone else. A film like this wouldn't work without individual and ensemble acting of the greatest intensity and honesty, and that's what it has. The title, by the way, is a reference to a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem that is quoted in the course of the film. Another poem comes to mind, the one by Yeats that goes, "But I am old and you are young/And I speak a barbarous tongue".

sensitively shot slice-of-life drama. Powerful and thought provoking though it is, it meanders to a wholly unsatisfactory resolution that left me feeling perturbed. My personal journey through the film took me through avenues of sadness, outrage, frustration and simmering anger.Not least amongst the reasons was the principal protagonist, Lisa, who is at heart immoral, thoroughly manipulative and deeply immoral. I don't like her. She's dishonest and blind to her own failings and dishonesty. I'm not given to violence but, had she been projected as a hologram in front of me, I'd have had a good go at throttling her.But it's not important to like a character in order to appreciate them. All of the characters are flawed and several would be best avoided at a social gathering, but they are flawed because they're real, or rather written and played with reality in mind. Lisa's actress mother, Joan, is, in her own way, as lost as her daughter, craving approval from Lisa but finding it only from her audience. Emily, the best friend of the corpse, is hurt, confused and angry, lashing out unreasonably at Joan's boyfriend Jean Reno for being anti-Semitic, although we later discover how inaccurate that was. People snap because they are hurt. It's understandable but it certainly doesn't stop one wanting to climb through the screen and yell at them for being so bitter, unreasonable and, in Lisa's case, odious. That such emotions are wrung from the viewer is testament to the precise performances of the actors and the firmly sensitive touch of writer/director Kenneth Lonergan. Even Alison Janney, as the casualty, makes her few minutes of screen time horribly memorable; last night I dreamt vividly of bloody and limbless victims struggling to comprehend their mortality. It's difficult to understand how a film shot in 2008 has only just reached our cinemas and that, last month when it opened, it did so in a total of one screen in one cinema for one week in the UK. I'd like to think my final word in Mark Kermode's video blog at 4 mins 10 secs had something to do the slightly increased exposure this month but it's probably just that, ultimately, quality is destined to triumph over popcorn fodder.At 150 minutes it's too long. Approximately one minute too long. The final scene gives hope that a level of honesty has finally been attained but then tragically, no, corruptly dissolves that hope by going too far for too long and undermining what might have been a redeeming step. It isn't! It's mawkish and as dishonest as this current stage of Lisa's life.