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October 12, 2011

Margaret (2011)

By the time you read this, Kenneth Lonergan's Margaret will probably be all but vanished from theaters, its unceremonious release and long road thereto already chronicled extensively enough to go unremarked upon here. What is noteworthy is that whatever version of the film that has finally been offered up here is, to my mind, a masterpiece, one of the top few films of the year, an instant classic if classicism didn't depend so much on context and if this film's context wasn't so mired in its own misfortune. This is a great movie. It probably would have been great at two hours, perhaps even greater at just under three, but at the (at-this-point-arbitrary) length of 2.5 hours it's still plenty grand enough to make its imminent disappearance from screens a sadness.

There comes a time in everyone's lives when the grandeur of adolescence becomes a footnote to adulthood; here is a movie that, among other things, reminds one not to underestimate the value all that overwrought duress. Among its additional attributes: a magnificently all-encompassing approach to an appropriately narrow subject, the most accurate losing-one's-virginity scene perhaps ever committed to screen, perfect performances, multiple scenes of overblown histrionics that are not only alarmingly textured but build upon each other to outstanding effect, a simple precision to the stately compositions the characters find themselves occupying, and an early allusion to The Catcher In The Rye ("movies are fucking bullshit" says a supporting character, in a way that's not nearly as obnoxious as you're currently thinking) that is just enough to guide the wary viewer's interpretation away from the possibility that this is just a movie about a tragic bus accident.

But at this point, the film's release is a courtesy, its status as a write-off a given, and its primary audience a small number who will do all they can to get their friends to go see it while they can, which is not long at all. Ten years from now, it will be remembered well, perhaps better than You Can Count On Me is now a decade since its own release (and Margaret is better, by quite a substantial margin) and all the hubris that buried it will be a fascinating footnote to its own qualities, which I believe will endure. Maybe the context helps. Nothing engenders favor in a subject like the sense that it's a secret.

That being said: go see it, if you can. You've got a day or two left.

Posted by David Lowery at October 12, 2011 11:48 AM