Mar­garet

In Ken­neth Lonergan’s Mar­garet it’s that old sym­bol of the Amer­i­can West – the cow­boy hat – which acts as the MacGuf­fin in a sprawl­ing, frus­trat­ing and the­mat­i­cal­ly rich slice of post‑9/​11, Bush-era self-analy­sis set in the heart of New York City.

Spoiled 17-year old Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) is walk­ing down a busy street when she dis­tracts a bus dri­ver (Mark Ruf­fa­lo) who’s wear­ing the kind of cow­boy hat she wants to get her hands on. The grue­some­ly ren­dered ensu­ing crash results in the death of a woman and sparks Lisa’s rather hate­ful odyssey to bring the bus dri­ver down and, pre­sum­ably, assuage her own guilt in the process.

Now, there are flawed char­ac­ters, and then there’s Lisa; it’s a brave move from Lon­er­gan to build an entire (and very long) movie around some­one so deter­mined­ly unlike­able. Tak­ing teenage angst and hor­mon­al impul­siv­i­ty to extreme lev­els, Lisa buc­ca­neers through the film ema­nat­ing a stench of enti­tle­ment and behav­ing appalling­ly to almost every­body she encoun­ters, includ­ing a Syr­i­an class­mate in a heat­ed dis­cus­sion about Mid­dle East­ern culture.

Mar­garet is burst­ing at the seams with themes – fam­i­ly, artis­tic ambi­tion, class, race, America’s liti­gious cul­ture – and is nov­el­is­tic in approach, recall­ing the work of Jonathan Franzen and Don DeLil­lo. Too many scenes, how­ev­er, sim­ply peter out as a result of slop­py edit­ing or linger in thrall to ver­bose indul­gence (some­times Lisa feels like a Clerks-era Kevin Smith char­ac­ter). A sub­plot fea­tur­ing Jean Reno as a smooth-yet-dull love inter­est for Lisa’s actor moth­er is extra­ne­ous and distracting.

Despite some bril­liant indi­vid­ual moments (in par­tic­u­lar the open­ing sequence and the stim­u­lat­ing class­room scenes) and strong per­for­mances from a large cast play­ing large­ly unsym­pa­thet­ic char­ac­ters, Mar­garet drags as ideas over­whelm the nar­ra­tive. Lon­er­gan strug­gled for years through law­suits and re-edits to get the film – which wrapped in 2005 – released. The ragged end result appro­pri­ate­ly reflects its trou­bled genesis.