Margaret (2011): Kenneth Lonergan’s Provocative Exploration of Painful Adolescence, Starring Anna Paquin

Kenneth Lonergan shot this drama about an Upper West Side teenager in 2005, as a follow-up to his superb indie, You Can Always Count on Me, the Sundance Fest winner, which was later nominated for several Oscars.

The film’s title derives from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child,” which is analyzed in Lisa’s English class. In the poem, the narrator addresses a young girl named Margaret, who mourns the falling autumn leaves as if they were deceased friends. The narrator informs Margaret that this sense of grief, though it feels profound, is an inescapable part of the human condition.

After a torturous process, the inevitably compromised movie was finally released in 2011. The battles over the final cut of Margaret have influenced the way the movie was received, and no version (there have been several over a period of a decade) is really satisfying. (See below).

Anna Paquin plays Lisa Cohen, who inadvertently causes the death of a pedestrian (Allison Janney) while flirting with a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo, who made a splashy impression Lonergan’s debut)

The pain of being a teenager starts to meld with the genuine trauma that Lisa feels as she tries (and fails) to make amends to the various people involved.

Lonergan’s sprawling (at times rambling) screenplay is both particular (set in New York City) and universal in its exploration of the pains and joys of being an adolescent.