Kenneth Lonergan (2011)

After watching Margaret, and being fascinated by it, I went straight down from NFT3 to the BFI shop to buy the DVD.   I hoped the disc might include material excised from the version released in cinemas, and it did:  the film I’d just watched was a full half-hour shorter than the 179-minute director’s cut on the DVD.   The tortuous gestation of Margaret is probably the best-known thing about it.  Filmed in 2005, the movie was eventually given a very limited release in the US in late 2011.  The intervening years saw (as well as the deaths of two of the producers, Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack) a succession of lawsuits, involving the writer-director Kenneth Lonergan, the production companies concerned, and Fox Searchlight Pictures, which had planned to release Margaret in 2007.  According to Wikipedia, Fox Searchlight insisted on a maximum running time of 150 minutes; a 165-minute version, on which Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker worked and which Lonergan (who co-wrote Gangs of New York) approved, was never completed because of a budget shortfall and the studio went ahead with releasing the 150-minute cut.  According to one of the two Sight and Sound pieces used for the BFI programme note, however, ‘The final Lonergan-approved cut – by Martin Scorsese and his editor Thelma Schoonmaker  – clocks in at 149 minutes and 40 seconds, just fulfilling the terms of [the] contract’.

One of these S&S articles sets the budget for Margaret at $12.4m and notes that the film grossed $46,495 during the five weeks it played in twelve American cities.  (The budget figure in the Wikipedia article is $14m and the box office returns to date are shown as $564k.)  Part of the fascination of Margaret (in the two-and-a-half-hour version) comes from your awareness that the film is misshapen and impacted – and from an overwhelming sense that Lonergan is trying to get at something important through the behaviour and the voices of his characters, especially the seventeen-year-old protagonist Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin).  The history of movie studios disfiguring – through a combination of commercial nerves and philistinism – the work of film artists naturally puts you on Lonergan’s side in the Margaret affair.  The disappointment of the director’s cut is that it detracts from the cinema version in virtually every respect in which they differ.   In this note, I’ll describe my first impressions before commenting on those differences and other aspects of my second viewing of the film.

Lisa Cohen, a New York City high-school student, lives in Manhattan with her mother, Joan, a well-known Broadway actress (J Cameron Smith, who is Kenneth Lonergan’s wife) and her younger brother Curtis (Cyrus Hernstadt).  Joan has split up from the children’s father, Karl (Lonergan), who lives in Malibu with his new partner Bonnie (Enid Graham).  Lisa and Curtis are due to go on a ranch holiday with Karl and Bonnie and, at the start of Margaret, Lisa goes looking for a cowboy hat on the Upper West Side.  She can’t find anything in the shops then sees that the driver of a bus at a nearby stop is wearing the kind of hat she’s looking for.  The bus pulls off but slowly enough for Lisa to run after it and gesture to the driver.  His attention distracted, he goes through a light that may be still red and is certainly not green.  He knocks down and fatally injures a woman pedestrian (Allison Janney), who dies in Lisa’s arms.  When the police take statements from her and the bus driver, Gerald Maretti (Mark Ruffalo), at the scene of the accident, he and Lisa lock eyes for a few moments.  Lisa tells the police that Maretti didn’t jump the lights.  She subsequently has second thoughts about the statement she’s made and tells her mother as much.  Joan, who’s preoccupied with the play she’s about to open in, weakly discourages her daughter from changing her statement but Lisa doesn’t let the matter lie.  She contacts, through the police, the next of kin of the dead woman, Monica Patterson; attends a memorial gathering, organised by Monica’s best friend, Emily (Jeannie Berlin); and visits Gerald Maretti’s home.  Maretti’s refusal to accept any kind of blame for the accident ignites Lisa’s determination to expose the truth of what happened.  She gives a changed statement to the kindly detective (Stephen Adly Guirgis) who first questioned her and, working with Emily and in consultation with Monica’s cousin, Abigail (Betsy Aidem), pursues a wrongful death lawsuit against the NYC Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA).

The several subplots of Margaret describe Lisa’s relationships with two boys in her class (Kieran Culkin and John Gallagher Jr), with a teacher (Matt Damon), with her father and, especially, with her mother – as well as Joan’s affair with a Colombian widower called Ramon (Jean Reno).   There’s a synergy between these stories and the film’s central narrative thread of Lisa’s emotive pursuit of what she sees as justice.  At the start, Lonergan shows people walking on the busy streets of New York and the sequence immediately has an elegiac quality.  The time and place in which he sets his story are particular.  The destruction of the World Trade Center and its consequences are referenced:  in the somewhat over-galvanised classroom discussions involving Lisa and other students; in occasional shots of side-by-side skyscrapers which echo the Twin Towers; in an aircraft disappearing behind a building; in an unashamedly flamboyant movement of the camera up from the street to the sky.   These evocations of 9/11 are fused with Lonergan’s exploration of how people burrow into or ignore trauma.

‘The world is too big to have it improved or affected by you – that’s something that most of us find’.  Kenneth Lonergan said this, with reference to Margaret, in an interview with Richard Brody of the New Yorker and it could serve as the moral of the film’s story.  Lisa Cohen is an extraordinary screen character:  she comes under increasing pressure to realise she’s not the centre of the universe yet she not only struggles to accept, but continues to fight against accepting, that realisation.  The catalysing traffic accident, which results from a piece of trivial selfishness on Lisa’s part, both makes her feel guilty and increases her sense of entitlement.  Lisa is someone who wants and demands attention – she has a particularly annoying habit of interrupting in class.  There’s a resonance between her histrionic personality and aspects of Anna Paquin’s playing of her.  In the opening classroom sequence, for example, Paquin is too aware of the camera – and Lonergan draws attention to this by the deliberate movement of his lens onto Lisa (then onto the teacher, Matt Damon’s Aaron Caije).  Although she passes for a late teenager in her scenes with older characters, Paquin sometimes seems too mature for the role in sequences involving Lisa and her supposed contemporaries.  But when Lisa is furiously emotional, Anna Paquin develops tremendous momentum and great dynamic force (at exceptional verbal speed).

Lisa’s mother is an anxiously egotistical actress; the daughter has strong self-dramatising tendencies.  This set-up may be obvious but its realisation, in the rows between Paquin and J Cameron Smith, is exciting.  These sequences feature some of Lonergan’s very best writing and direction.  The structure of the escalating arguments is fully convincing, as is the detail of the dialogue.  Paquin and Cameron Smith express a tension between their characters’ compulsion to strike attention-getting attitudes and the sometimes incoherent strength of feeling which underlies this attitudinising.  The pressure of this tension is potent because most of the characters in Margaret are highly articulate – in Lisa’s case, perhaps hyper-articulate – and increased because Kenneth Lonergan is experiencing problems of communication analogous to Lisa’s.  (The director’s voice in Margaret brings to mind, though its register is very different, J Alfred Prufrock’s exasperated ‘It is impossible to say just what I mean!’)   It’s this pressure, in combination with the cast’s brio, that makes the film almost continuously and excitingly tantalising.  There is so much going on between the actors and the quality of the playing extends to small supporting roles:  Betsy Aidem, as Monica’s mercenary cousin Abigail, Jonathan Hadary as Russell Deutsch, the lawyer who takes on the suit against the MTA, and Rosemarie DeWitt, as Gerry Maretti’s wife, are especially fine.

Nearly everyone in Margaret turns out to have more sides than you expect from your introduction to them – for example, the two boys in Lisa’s class.   John Gallagher Jr’s Darren, who’s really keen on her, seems relievingly uncomplicated and sane.  It’s touching when, after Lisa tells him she doesn’t want to talk and hangs up, Darren breaks down at the other end of the line.  Lisa, again by phone, asks Kieran Culkin’s Paul, an up-himself smart-aleck, to take her virginity, and he obliges with rather more sensitivity than you expect, at least until premature ejaculation and a hasty assurance that Lisa’s unlikely to be pregnant as a result.   The character of Ramon is exceptionally well written.  This IT executive, who initially comes to watch Joan in previews of the new play, is a mostly dull conversationalist but he’s courteously charming too.  Jean Reno combines these qualities perfectly and J Cameron Smith makes something both comical and heartless out of Joan’s dilemma – she’s bored by but physically attracted to Ramon.   Lonergan himself, in the  long-distance phone calls between Lisa and her father, is maybe a shade too low-key naturalistic (although the growing crisis around ordering catering for the ranch holiday, because the matter is so relatively trivial, becomes powerfully irritating).  There’s one moment in particular when Lonergan and his actors achieve something that it’s relatively unusual to see on screen – the suggestion, through a few incidental words and gestures, that two people go back a long way.  Emily and Lisa begin their attempt to bring to book the MTA and Gerry Maretti by having lunch with Dave (Michael Ealy), a young lawyer whom Emily’s known since he was a boy.  Emily is impatient with what she sees as Dave’s obfuscating legalese.  He is politely exasperated with the questions that she (along with Lisa) keeps firing at him but Jeannie Berlin and Michael Ealy convey a real sense of a shared, secure, mutual affection.  Every bit of the film that features Emily is remarkable:  Jeannie Berlin expresses the character’s anger and grief at the loss of her friend Monica with extraordinary and incisive variety.

There are frustrating scenes which don’t take Margaret forward in terms of either incident or character development but there are also occasional sequences which, though tangential, are so completely satisfying in themselves that you’re grateful Lonergan kept them in.  The prime example is an English literature class at Lisa’s school, in which the teacher, Mr Van Tassel (Matthew Broderick), asks the students to explain Gloucester’s lines, in the fourth act of King Lear:

‘As flies to wanton boys are we to th’ gods.

They kill us for their sport’

One of the boys in the class (Jake O’Connor) has a wrongheaded interpretation, with which no one agrees, but his monotonous, unshakeable insistence flusters the uneasily affable teacher and, eventually, makes him snappishly dogmatic about what the lines do and don’t mean.  Matthew Broderick gives a beautiful performance, developing the character of the awkward Mr Van Tassel each time that he appears.  The teacher likes the sound of his own voice reading a Shakespeare part or the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem To a Young Child (from which the film takes its title[1]).  Van Tassel suggests a fine understanding of the words being spoken yet he makes them sadly colourless.  When he comes across Lisa and a friend smoking dope in Central Park, Broderick shows, as the teacher walks away from their giggles, how easy it is to embarrass Mr Van Tassel.  The King Lear episode completes his defeat.  The other teacher, Aaron Caije, is much less credible:  this isn’t the fault of Matt Damon, who plays him intelligently, but it’s increasingly hard to believe that Caije would be so foolish or lacking in self-discipline as to spend even a minute of extra-curricular time with Lisa, when it’s obvious she’s making a play for him.

Lonergan’s staging of the traffic accident and its aftermath is startling.   The repeated looks and gestures between Lisa and Gerry Maretti – as she points to his hat and he doesn’t get what she’s after – ratchet up your sense of dread that something terrible is going to happen.  This still doesn’t prepare you for what comes next.  One of Monica Patterson’s legs is severed when the bus hits her.  Her physical condition is clearly hopeless but she’s conscious during her last few minutes of life.   Allison Janney brilliantly manages to suggest an increasing rift between Monica’s mental and physical planes of existence – there are moments when it really does seem as if the woman’s soul is separating from her body.  The impact of this stays with you and chimes with Lisa’s later, egocentric account of what she felt was happening – an account which triggers an excoriating response from Emily.  The accident is so shocking, however, that, for a while, it’s hard for the viewer to adjust to life going on in the film after it occurs.  It’s also hard to credit that Lisa is not more traumatised by the physical experience of holding the bloody, dying woman.  This draws attention to a major improbability in Lonergan’s script.  It’s most unlikely that Lisa isn’t offered counselling after the accident and incredible that, in an affluent middle-class New York family like hers, this possibility is never mentioned.  Lisa, whose sizeable ego is matched by a propensity for talking about how she thinks and feels, would surely be keen on the prospect of therapy – something she would demand even if no one else thought to suggest it.

 Knowing the troubled history of Margaret’s development naturally makes you wonder how much of the occluded quality of the 150-minute cut results from what’s been removed.  Kenneth Lonergan’s three-hour version, however, underlines and enlarges the film’s faults.  I was never sure, on the first viewing, whether Lisa, in saying what really happened to cause the accident, admitted to her mother or to Emily or to the police that she distracted the bus driver.  I paid particular attention to this second time around and she makes no such admission.  It’s clear that Lisa transfers some of the guilt she feels onto Gerry Maretti, whose willed lack of guilt appals her.  (Mark Ruffalo is even better than I originally thought in the showdown with Lisa:  his dead eyes are an expression of Maretti’s determination to keep the truth at bay.)  The primary legal purpose of the suit brought against his employers is to obtain financial compensation for Monica Patterson’s next of kin but Lisa is much more concerned with the driver’s being made to pay.  The MTA agree to settle financially out of court but refuse to include disciplinary action against Maretti as part of the settlement.  Russell Deutsch advises Monica’s cousin and her husband to accept the payout, which they’re audibly delighted to do, but Lisa is outraged.  In the conference call in Deutsch’s office, she blurts out, ‘I killed her but at least I feel guilty!’   Even allowing that Emily and Deutsch think Lisa is distraught, why is there no reaction whatsoever to her outburst, when she hasn’t suggested this kind of responsibility before?

On a second viewing, the film’s ending is even phonier than it first seemed.  Joan’s suitor Ramon has taken her a couple of times to the opera.  When he dies of a heart attack, Joan has a spare ticket for The Tales of Hoffmann at the Met and asks Lisa if she’d like to come with her.  (It seems unlikely that the tickets would have been in Joan’s possession, rather than Ramon’s, but that’s a small point.)  During the singing of the famous Barcarolle duet (‘Belle nuit, o nuit d’amour …’), Lisa starts to weep uncontrollably.  She and the mother, whose relationship has been so fractious, hug each other and don’t let go before the screen goes blank and the film’s closing credits come up.  The vague implication that something has been resolved is too facile.  If Lonergan wanted to suggest that Lisa had somehow ‘progressed’, he might have done better to have her react quietly to the outcome of the lawsuit and end Margaret on a moment of telling diminuendo.

The extended version not only includes additional footage but also a revised score and sound mix, with unfortunate results.  Lonergan smothers the soundtrack, and sometimes the dialogue, with Nico Muhly’s ‘Liebestod’ pastiche score.  This detracts from foreground musical elements like the Offenbach Barcarolle in the final scene.  When I first saw Margaret, I thought Lonergan didn’t know what to leave out; it looks from the director’s cut as if he doesn’t believe in leaving anything out.  There are several bits of dialogue spoken by characters who are off-screen or who, if they are visible, never reappear – as if to tell the audience that any one of these people could have been the subject of the story but Lonergan happens to have chosen Lisa Cohen.  This seems such an obvious point to make.  Worse, the snippets of conversation aren’t inviting – they don’t make you want to know more about the other people.   The effect of expanding the material is, in almost every case, to weaken it.  There are several more shots of planes flying at or near the summit of tall buildings, several more cityscapes which, beautiful as they are, come to seem nothing more than visual flourishes.  A meeting between Lisa and Aaron Caije in which she asks if she can ride his bike benefits from the inclusion of Matt Damon’s reaction to what Lisa says after the ride – but this makes her eventual seduction of Caije all the more improbable.  In the shorter version, when Lisa subsequently confronts Caije and a woman teacher outside the school, and tells them she’s had an abortion but doesn’t know who the father was (it could have been either Caije or the deflowerer Paul), the scene is strengthened by your not being sure whether Lisa is inventing the termination.  The sequences in the extended version which describe her visit to the abortion clinic are themselves poor and weaken the subsequent conversation with Caije.

As she goes with Joan to the Met, Lisa is transfixed by a bus travelling along the street:  Gerry Maretti is driving it.  In the shorter version, you can accept this too as Lisa’s imagination – or, rather, that, whenever she sees a NYC bus, she will always see Maretti in the driver’s seat.  Lonergan’s version inserts an earlier sequence, when Lisa sees a bus and peers at it, and the driver isn’t Maretti.  This creates the impression that he really is the driver of the later bus, which seems merely daft and improbable.  (The only purely helpful addition in the director’s cut is the information that Lisa’s father Karl, whose line of work isn’t explained in the shorter version, directs commercials.)  Kenneth Lonergan, best known as a playwright, is a very gifted screenwriter.  My main feeling after watching Margaret a second time was that the film might have been much more successful with a different director and tougher script editing.  But I still think this is one of the most engrossing botches I’ve ever seen.

30 August 2014, Autumn 2014

[1]  ‘Margaret, are you grieving/Over Goldengrove unleaving …‘