Some notes on MARGARET:
- A couple times, I was reminded of that scene in Assayas’s Summer Hours, where the sister and two brothers discuss the fate of their family’s estate. Lonergan’s down-to-brass-tacks long takes especially ripen when erratic teenage emotions, no matter how sincere, are on display. It’s as if something on screen thickens, like batter, when the camera stays on a conversation that at first appears to have no possible resolution. The especially long confabs, one in particular with a lawyer, Paquin and Jeannie Berlin, and two others on a conference call, sprouts like a symphony: we’re in it yet anticipating the big bang, simultaneously.
- Explored are the many ways we opt out of communication: shushing, cursing, shock, yelling, waving one’s arms, correcting one’s English, mimicking, appearing tongue-tied, appearing misunderstood, kicking someone out, passively listening, storming out, running away, showing skin, not trying hard enough to care, crying.
- Anna Paquin is incredible as a teenage girl. In one scene, house-party-drunk, she stumbles from one boy to another—daring with one, woolly with the other. She’s willful and foggy, and her ability to flop down on the floor and make-out with a boy after having just made-out with another, only to struggle when getting up, is exact.
- She’s also able to one-up adults and push buttons in a manner that is incredibly uncomfortable to watch. Teenage discomfort is not easy to look at. It overcompensates. It’s ugly and a bit ridiculous. It’s a performance.
- Truly great is how Lonergan’s long takes are balanced by his quicker ones: like when Lisa tells a boy who really likes her, that she’s not in the mood to talk on the phone. The request is simple, but the scene cuts to him sobbing, sitting on the edge of his bed under a Pavement poster
- The movie unfolds like a 19th century novel. It’s as if the entire world and history of the world, exists in this world: science, art, family, city, country, rage, love, revenge, death, growing up, growing old, failure and success
