Margaret Makes the Most of its Second Chance

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Feb 22, 2012 10:20PM

Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret was a blip on the Chicago's radar last autumn. It got no promotion, one under-advertised press screening, and disappeared after a single week. In fact, Fox Searchlight never got it into more than 14 theaters nationwide (their tent-pole film of the previous year, Black Swan, played on as many as 2,400). And yet, as it nears the end of a week-long second life, there is no hotter ticket in town, with a string of sold out screenings sending lines snaking from the box office down the stairs and nearly out the front door of the Gene Siskel Film Center.

Time Out Chicago's Ben Kenisberg led a chorus of local critics singing the film's praises and decrying the brusque treatment of a film that deserved awards, not exile. Their efforts were soon rewarded with a Chicago Film Critics Association nomination. When we attended a screening on Friday night, Kenisberg was justifiably giddy, snapping photos of the sellout crowd as ABC 7 shot b-roll of the eager ticket-holders.

So is it worth the fuss? Absolutely. Anna Paquin's performance as Lisa, the in-over-her-head teenager drowning in a devastating cocktail of problems both frighteningly adult and painfully adolescent, is itself worth the price of admission. After the privileged young New Yorker distracts a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), causing a deadly accident, she caroms from one coping strategy to the next amid a ragtag ensemble of authority figures too self-involved or too compromised themselves to help her to deal effectively with the tragedy. Withdrawing from her actress mother (J. Smith-Cameron), she inserts herself into the life of the victim's dearest friend (the magnificent Jeannie Berlin). Lisa tries on her grief the way a child might wear her mother's gown, while hypnotic montages of bustling magic hour New York City sidewalks and skylines connect the chapters of the "teen epic she pens for herself. Matthew Broderick, Matt Damon, Jean Reno and Kieran Culkin round out the supporting cast.

The final third of its 150 minute runtime is uneven, with the sutures from a notoriously difficult editing by no means effaced by the years and care. We're not sure if Lonergan's longer cut, or the stab taken by Martin Scorcese could have fixed what ails it, but we'll call it beside the point. Like the psyche of a teen, the film has some jumbled, confused and mismatched bits, but the outsized spirit of the whole is not negated by the imperfect realization of its vessel.

The intervening years have made the film's temporal setting drastically more appreciable: the watermark of the early 2000s is on nearly every frame. Lisa is haunted by death within a city still reeling from its own tragedy, within a movie itself traumatized by botched surgery and abandonment. So far, the movie of the year is from last year, about the last decade, and you've only got two more nights to see for yourself.

Margaret screens tonight at 7:45 p.m. and tomorrow, Thursday, February 23, at 6:30 p.m. at the Film Center. UPDATE: The Film Center has announced that the film will be back for an second encore, April 27 - May 3.