Margaret (Kenneth Lonergan, 2011)

[J Adams]

See it. At least on Sunday it was showing at Cinema Village's largest screen, in 35mm. And had decent attendance for a 1pm screening. The 35mm adds necessary atmosphere.

Not sure how much this film will resonate with non-Manhattanites.

I agree the lead actors are wasted except one Broderick scene where a student astutely questions Broderick's interpretation of Shakespeare.

Not a masterpiece, but sometimes failed attempts at masterpieces are more interesting than successul ones.

[Dylan]

What a severely misleading tone the trailer for this has. I'm also unable to understand the bulk of the reviews most critics & audiences have given, basically amounting to the thumbnail of "a fascinating mess, a glorious failure." What mess? What failure? I think "Margaret" is the greatest film of 2011 by a wide margin, and one of the most bracing and powerful works in modern cinema. It was certainly a thoroughly traumatic and highly empathetic experience for me. Among other things this is a meditation on dealing with harsh epiphanies, something I think all of us can relate to.

One of the many things "Margaret" made me think about was what it looked and felt like as a kid to wake up from a sheltered and limited point of view and begin to understand how much was going on around me. I remember being a child fastened to the seatbelt in the back seat of my father's car as he was driving me to school, peering into the windows of the other cars, and that realization hitting me for the first time that everybody I was looking at is probably experiencing something deeper and more solemn than what my life revolved around. Everything about life seems a bit more frightening and confusing when layers like that suddenly peel away. I relate this because "Margaret" not only expresses this kind of human epiphany cinematically -- astonishingly weaving the possible developments and repercussions from it through its plot & visuals and through the voice of every single character -- but it also turns this sometimes painful human observation into a highly sensitive and operatic drama. I had emotions and sensations (highs and lows) while watching this that I've never had in a cinema before. For me, this film is something new.

Anna Paquin channels, surpasses, dismantles, and reinvents the daunting bar she raised for herself as an Oscar-winning child actor. I'll go even further than that and also say that this is one of the great screen performances. Her range of emotion and how it shifts and develops into subtleties and extremes on a dime, the close-ups of her in angst and terror and happiness, the development of her sensuality and progressive severity of her relentless pursuits. The character felt very real to me while I was watching her. And maybe a positive attribute to seeing this in a completely empty theater, but I flat out broke down during the finale,

Spoiler

when the character reaches another epiphany, less violent but equally as sudden as the one that opens the film. Visually, the film puts her character in the place of everybody else in the world, cutting to the actors and other audience members attending the opera, then finally sharing with her mother the sadness & disappointment & tragedy of everything that's happened. I couldn't believe what I was watching.

A few points:

-From the first scene, "Margaret" seems out of time. Even if 9/11 and other topics are referenced that place it pretty firmly in 2006, somehow it feels and even looks older than that, like the product of 1980's Hollywood. The filmmaking is constantly thoughtful and surprisingly intelligent in a way we're rarely if ever treated to in a Hollywood film anymore. Visually, it's surprisingly grainy and low-lit yet rapturous with creative and sometimes daring visual sequences and montage. The camera lingers and often moves or cuts to where you least expect it to. I imagine the longer cuts featured more lingering images of the people and buildings around Paquin's character - I can also imagine the final scene being much longer - but I think the purely visual sequences carry a truly awesome (in every sense of the word) visceral and dramatic impact in any case.

-It has a very interesting score by a young composer named Nico Muhly. The main theme that plays over the title sequence (comprised of beautiful slow motion shots of people walking through the streets of New York City) is surprisingly Spanish in style, bringing an almost eerie and appropriately otherworldly (or simply "foreign") shading to the sequence & the rest of the film. The titles immediately anticipate the protagonist's central epiphany visually and aurally - the people themselves are strangers & the music is derived from another country entirely. Yet another very intelligent stroke in a film that's loaded with them.

-There's an interesting scene with the lawyer giving a dialogue that suddenly cuts - while he continues to speak - to a shot of this building in the foreground and a boat sailing by on the water in the background. Something about this seemed very audacious to me, as if the camera itself is looking out the window as it's listening to him finish his spiel.

-The film's copyright during the end title scroll is 2008, with it's actual release year of 2011 nowhere in sight. This suggests to me that this cut of the film (one of many, it seems) was prepared for release in 2008 but held due to the lawsuit and Lonergan wanting to push for the version that was 30 minutes longer.

Also, though I may have missed it, I didn't see Scorsese or Schoonmaker's names anywhere on the film, which only suggests to me that the cut they helped Lonergan with is not this one in any part (or else they would be somewhere in the credits, right?) and that there's a vastly different assembly of "Margaret" at the studio. While it's easy to consider that what was released is a very precise 150-minute compromise between the studio's wishes for 120 minutes and Lonergan's for 180 minutes, something tells me that this is a different assembly entirely. Maybe not, but there isn't any in depth investigation about this online yet, so we'll just have to wait until somebody talks.

For those holding out on seeing this: I might be wrong but I imagine the very best we can hope for in regards to the additional material/cuts is some deleted scenes on the DVD/Blu, so if you have the opportunity to see it in the theater please do, it's a movie I feel must be seen in a theater if you have the opportunity to do so.

There's more to say about this but this post is getting pretty long. I hope others chime in. Was anybody on here even remotely as moved and impressed by this film as I was?

[franco]

Margaret is also by far my favorite movie of 2011. I am nowhere as eloquent as Dylan is, so I'll just say I am quite satisfied with the movie in its current form. Likewise, I can't understand how the words "mess" or "failure" could be used on it. It feels a lot more complete than a whole lot of movies released these days.

[domino harvey]

No word yet on a US release date, but the UK branch of Fox has set an impossibly distant July 2 release date for R2 (DVD only)

[Oedipax]

No word yet on a US release date, but the UK branch of Fox has set an impossibly distant July 2 release date for R2 (DVD only)

Blu, too

[domino harvey]

Well, that's a bit of good news at least!

[Fierias]

Eugene Hernandez of Indiewire also mentioned on twitter that the US DVD would have the Director's Cut, and that it would come out in May. Presumably, this also means that the UK blu will have the director's cut. And I assume the US will also get a blu, but that hasn't been mentioned yet.

Tidbit from Searchlight bash (pretty sure I can share it): MARGARET DVD in May will include a directors cut; not finished for theatrical.

[Dylan]

Wow! So the best case scenario emerged for this afterall. I'm in complete surprise - props to Fox for this. Of course, it's still a shame the film was dumped by the studio for theatrical release, but at least it will meet its wide audience in the director's preferred version. I can hardly imagine the film being better than it already is, but more scenes could only improve the already spectacular work.

[bdsweeney]

Seemingly, the blu-ray of this has been pulled from schedule ...

http://www.bva.org.uk/node/1761283

[hearthesilence]

Motherf***** - better just be a delay.

[Jeff]

DVD and Blu-ray available July 10th, as an Amazon exclusive (at first).

Will include both the 150-minute theatrical release and the 186-minute Lonergan-approved cut.

[mfunk9786]

Amazing, amazing news. Glad I waited to see the film so I can dive right into the director's cut.

[domino harvey]

Holy shit, thank you God

[dad1153]

Day one purchase! :)

[rockysds]

It seems the extended cut might only be present on the dvd. From blu-ray.com:

Update: From Fox's press release, it appears that the extended version appears only on the DVD included in the Blu-ray/DVD combo pack (Fox's exact wording is, "the two-disc Blu-ray set includes the theatrical version as well as a bonus DVD featuring the never-before-seen extended cut").

[domino harvey]

Why is it so hard to get this right? Sighhh

[Ishmael]

...a bonus DVD featuring the never-before-seen extended cut.

Never before seen! Not even the editors have the film have seen it! Not even the director himself has seen it! It's NEVER BEEN SEEN!

[mfunk9786]

Fucking idiots. Looks like I'll just be waiting for a Blu-ray to come out elsewhere and

Spoiler

pirating the 1080p .mkv rip

out of spite. I was really excited to preorder, too!

Does anyone know who is producing this release? It'd be nice to have someone who we can contact en masse about this - if we can bitch and moan at Criterion about cover art long enough for them to change it, I think we can make an effort to get Fox to reconsider their final pressing of this Blu-ray.

Confirmation from a FOX employee on Twitter that the extended cut will only be on the DVD, and that if Kenneth Lonergan were on fire, FOX wouldn't pee on him to put it out.

[domino harvey]

The first time in history where the Blu is the bonus throw away disc-- I fear too much bitching may result in the extended cut disappearing entirely, a far more tragic endgame

[Jean-Luc Garbo]

Exactly. How on earth do these people not know that both cuts could fit on the Blu?

[swo17]

Well, at least the Blu-ray will reproduce the experience of originally watching the film in the theater for the five people that were able to see it there.

[zedz]

Latest news is that Lonergan's cut will be presented on a bonus Beta tape, available in the dumpster around the corner from wherever you buy the BluRay.

And the main feature on the BluRay will be preceded by two and a half hours of unskippable industry warnings, mostly about employing Kenneth Lonergan.

[cdnchris]

And the main feature on the BluRay will be preceded by two and a half hours of unskippable industry warnings, mostly about employing Kenneth Lonergan.

Presented with the highest bitrate possible and taking up at least 3/4 of the space on the disc.

[hearthesilence]

I'm hoping I'm wrong about this, but my biggest concern is that the studio has never bothered with a proper transfer of the director's cut, and that this is a major reason why they've chosen to issue it on DVD only. I hope I'm wrong, but given the struggles this film has had in the past, I can see how that would happen. No one in charge thought they'd release the director's cut - why would they when they had so little faith in the picture, virtually dumping it on its initial release? And then when critics championed this film and demand grew (something that wasn't anticipated), they realized there was more money to be made, but went about it the cheapest and quickest way possible, relying on pre-existing materials.

[Oedipax]

Pretty much. It's probably SD because that's all that exists. We'll be lucky if there isn't burned-in timecode.