Republic of Outsiders by Alissa Quart

Author:Alissa Quart
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595588944
Publisher: The New Press

FILM BLOGGERS AS ANGELS

Sometimes the new film outsiders had their victories after their films were made, and Margaret is a perfect case study of that phenomenon. If you have heard of it, it’s not because it was written and directed by the pedigreed Kenneth Lonergan, who was twice nominated for an Academy Award, or because it starred renowned actors who were usually above-the-line talent in television or film franchises, such as Matt Damon and Anna Paquin. Its huge multinational company, Fox Searchlight, did nothing for it. The major film critics from the New York Times and Variety were not impressed. If you have heard of the film, it is because fans, bloggers, and smaller-scale critics spread the word about the film tirelessly online, especially on Twitter. A small grassroots movement of film renegades formed to save the movie.

On the face of it, Margaret started out as more conventional fare than many other vanguard works. It had movie stars, including Paquin as Lisa Cohen, a maddening teen girl who causes a terrible accident and must live with—and self-dramatize—the consequences, and Damon and Matthew Broderick as her teachers.

At a certain point, the film breaks into multiple narratives and becomes the story of civil lawsuits; high school teaching; social class divisions; the ethics of death, mourning, and age-inappropriate romances; casual anti-Semitism and Zionist rigidities; the New York theater scene; opera as metaphor; and unpleasant midlife dating. Characters use phrases such as “moral gymnasium.” Overheard conversations pass in and out of audible hearing. The central characters are troubled and troubling. Like certain independent 1970s films or sprawling nineteenth-century novels, Margaret tries to accommodate a full world that doesn’t always make sense, and it presents all sorts of subliminal messages. It starts with the central teenage character and grows more and more expansive, following other characters as it progresses: the girl’s mother, the mother’s lover, one lawyer and then another, a group of actors, opera singers. The result is a surprising cacophony that mirrors New York life. Lonergan’s idea was that the only way to see the inner workings of society is by representing a multitude of different people, where everyday connections and disruptions torment the film’s inhabitants. No comfortable resolution is obtained. The resulting film is messy, overly long, and uneven, yet it has a parable-like power.

Shot in 2005 from a script completed in 2003, the film is also full of allusions to 9/11: mirrored towers reflecting planes, ominous clear blue skies, and cosmopolitans filmed from high above, unaware of how they might seem from the vantage of an airplane or a god. At the same time, Margaret is a prickly film about an angry teenager, middle-aged women, and unglamorous death.

But the real difficulties for the film happened after shooting was completed. Lonergan wound up in a legal dispute with a financer because the film hadn’t come in at under two and a half hours, as it was contractually required to. He and others (including Martin Scorsese) recut it numerous times in an attempt to get to a shorter running time.

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