Kenneth Lonergan (USA, born 1962)

Margaret (2011)

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

[After Blue is the Warmest Color and Boyhood], this is the third film in a row which deals, at its centre, with a person who is notable for their youth (this time named Lisa, played by Anna Paquin), and is much longer than your typical movie. In this instance, the film was released in two versions- a 150-minute studio cut, and a three-hour director’s cut which I am to believe is much closer to Kenneth Lonergan’s original vision. I have just watched the shorter version, so I will review that one here and view the longer one at a later date, giving it a second review.

It’s a strange one. On the one hand, it’s quite mainstream, with its roster containing some highly recognisable names. I also felt, especially in its early scenes, that it was somehow filmed and presented in a ‘mainstream’ manner- the bus crash death scene is harrowing, but also a little glossy, a little overcooked, kinda like a Lifetime TV movie.

This is one of those rare films that I feel is at its strongest in its midsection. Around an hour in, it seemed the film had found its feet and steadied itself upon its slightly shaky foundations. Then it sort of lost me again in the final third. Like Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, A History of Violence, Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring, or, to a lesser extent, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, it is difficult for me to say what exactly the ‘point’ of this movie is supposed to be. I know how damning that sounds, and I know it strongly infers that I didn’t like it. That’s not necessarily the case. To a reasonable extent, I did like it. There were certainly aspects, and individual scenes, that I admired, and I do believe it’s an uncommonly brave and unusual piece of filmmaking, especially considering context. But more prevalently than any of this, I was underwhelmed and confused.

Let me give you an example. I believe that the character Matthew Broderick plays, a teacher, could have been completely excised from the movie without losing anything. This is not meant to be a reflection on either the actor or the character, but I think he’s only in three short scenes anyway. Harsh? Well, I feel the same about Kieran Culkin. And the father character, played by director Kenneth Lonergan himself. And, perhaps most boldly and divisively, Matt Damon. Ostensibly, Damon features in a ‘pivotal’ scene, but aside from showing us how mercenary and unpleasant and immature our lead character can be, I don’t know what the ‘point’ of his inclusion was.

I wasn’t completely sold on the Jean Reno character, either. Where does that leave us? Let’s say we cut out every one of these characters- all male- and look at what we’re left with. The Mark Ruffalo character, undeniably vital in essence, could nevertheless have possibly functioned as an offscreen character. He’s also, like Broderick, hardly in it. Let’s lose him too.

By my reckoning, you’d now have a film that was about 90 minutes long, maybe even 100- a pretty standard length. And, with the exception of Olivia Thirlby’s minor character, it would be filled with strong, flawed portraits of females that you couldn’t remove even if you wanted to. Lonergan explores Lisa’s harsh, discordant relationship with her mother, which, maddeningly, doesn’t seem to need to be that bad. He explores the adolescent Lisa’s attempts to engage with a fully adult, experienced, resourceful woman, played by Jeannie Berlin, as if she is her peer and equal, and despite flashes of valiant brilliance, failing.

Lisa is a character who deliberately and pointedly tries to transcend her adolescence. Perhaps this is a reason for the strained relationship with her mother, who would probably rather she be a ‘normal’ 17-year-old girl (whatever that is). One could point out that Blue is the Warmest Colour’s Adele does this too, entering the world of sex and relationships when she doesn’t necessarily have the wherewithal or maturity for either. In Anna Paquin’s distinctly spiky, finely-realised Lisa, one gets the feeling that her attempts are more ‘performance-based’ than others we have seen in Fish Tank, Ida, or Boyhood. She is ‘performing’ adulthood- performing for her mother, who is thoroughly and understandably exasperated by this woman-child, performing for her handsome teacher, Matt Damon, who is initially irritated but eventually somewhat succumbs to it, and performing for her potential role-model and mentor, played by Jeannie Berlin, who doesn’t succumb to it at all, but, at least for a while, entertains her, for reasons of practicality, civility, and decorum.

Like I said, it’s a strange one. How many other movies could you name whereby you could, at least hypothetically, cut out all the male characters but none of the major female ones, and has been both helmed and written by a male director? And features several bona fide Hollywood stars? It passes the Bechdel test so conclusively that it almost pummels it into the ground.

Like Blue is the Warmest Colour, Margaret makes pointed references to high art. In the former movie, these took the form of passing, insubstantial mentions of Sartre and Klimt which felt like little more than name-dropping. In Margaret, it’s theatre, opera and literary quotations making up the backdrop. Again, I feel that there are question marks over whether this necessarily adds anything, or if there is any ‘point’ to it. Are Lonergan and Kechiche deliberately, perhaps even cynically, trying to gild their films with vicarious prestige?

Earlier, I called Leviathan novelistic, and I also touched on this quality when I unenthusiastically discussed Uncle Boonmee. I mentioned Leviathan’s ‘discordant notes’, receiving them much more favourably than those that are struck in Margaret. One feels that if this were a novel, possibly written from the viewpoints of several different characters, then it could potentially work very well. If it were an album, it would be a double, like The White Album, and it would have tracks that were superb, and others that were divergent, distinctly off-centre, and largely unloved- Wild Honey Pie, say, or Why Don’t We Do it in the Road. Or perhaps it would be, at least spiritually, Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, an album full of idiosyncrasies, discordancy, and nuances, very distinctly American, rejected by its label, and a critical darling when it eventually did see the light of day.

Margaret (2012) (extended cut) 

(This review, written as part of the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, freely makes reference to other films from the same list and does not read as well when taken out of its original context. It is reproduced here only for the convenience of having a director’s works collected on the same page.)

Going into this three-hour edit of Margaret, I expected to have much the same reaction as last time. I expected that the ‘problems’ I’d had with the first run-through would all still be there, especially when they largely revolved around what I saw as an unnecessary digressional proliferation of characters and sub-plots. I didn’t see how an extended runtime could possibly temper such perceptions.

I was wrong. This isn’t a perfect movie by any means, but it is one which is so much freer, and breathes far more easily, than its truncated edit.

This was apparent from an early stage. I wasn’t always able to remember exactly which scenes I’d seen before and which I hadn’t- the rising and falling tides of the film often render this irrelevant- but it just felt like this incarnation had far more oil in its joints.

On the one hand, a short scene of Jean masturbating, present in the shorter version too, serves no narrative purpose and seems a baffling decision (as does another scene where she’s topless in front of a mirror). On the other, it recalls the queasy intimacy of Blue is the Warmest Color, indicating that the character portraits in the movie are so unusually up close and personal as to risk viewer discomfort, perhaps a factor in why my original review was so lukewarm. In that review, I also called the movie ‘quite mainstream’, ‘glossy’ and ‘kinda like a Lifetime TV movie’. I don’t now think these statements are accurate; this isn’t really mainstream filmmaking at all, and my judgement was probably coloured by films I had just recently covered at the time, such as Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter…and Spring and Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, pieces that were striking in their individualistic lack of commercialism. Another factor was the movie’s willingness to indulge in melodrama, an aspect that I think was diluted in this longer edit.

It’s still episodic. I’ve seen this charge aimed at other movies and used as a pejorative, but one wonders to what extent all movies are ‘episodic’, as they move dutifully from one scene or set-piece to another. At one point does a given scene become an ‘episode’? Was not Finding Nemo, for example, a series of episodes placed together in a certain rhythm to form a whole? Or The Secret in Their Eyes? Or Only Lovers Left Alive? Or Leviathan? What is ‘episodic’, really, and can it be taken seriously as a valid criticism?

I dunno. I’m sure there are a multitude of different conclusions one could feasibly draw on such an issue. What makes the raising of it seem pertinent in this specific review is that I felt this three-hour version of Margaret might have worked very well as a mini-series of six half-hour episodes, or three hour-long ones. Lonergan could maybe even have expanded this material further and produced a longer-form series in the vein of Kieslowski’s Dekalog. This is the polar opposite of sentiments I expressed in my first review which advocated cutting the film down and accentuating its most ‘necessary’ elements, sentiments which came about through a largely fruitless search for the film’s meaning and general reason to exist.

These aren’t issues that I feel the film has anymore, if it ever even really did. In fact, I think that there are a wealth of potential core themes that a reviewer can identify and choose to focus on, should they be so inclined, and they’re all perfectly valid. For one, we have yet another portrait of New York- Lonergan’s camera gives us several lingering panoramas of the skyline which I didn’t remember being present in the first cut, set to the poetical strains of opera and classical music and reflecting the panoramic way in which our characters’ lives are being presented. Even without such inserts, this is not the rather anonymous setting we were presented with in Shame; instead, for me, it was far more similar to the prickly behemoth which came across in 25th Hour, one that keeps a daunting, incessant, watchful eye over Central Park, that seems to actively bear down on the people that are slaves to its machinations, emphasising their ostensibly paltry levels of direction and significance. Another point of comparison with 25th Hour, along with A Separation, is that the movie documents a short but momentous and extremely challenging period in our characters’ lives that will have huge emotional effects on them for years to come, yet will likely go barely noticed by their contemporaries, who are all living out their own personal unscripted dramas. One can imagine Lisa trying to talk through her experiences in one of the sessions resembling group therapy that occur at her school, while her classmates roll their eyes and resent the amount of attention and distinction she’s attempting to claim. Teenagers, being teenagers, are particularly unlikely to be moved by Lisa’s plight and will probably be more apt to think their own problems more pertinent.

It was issues such as this that this longer, more cohesive incarnation of Margaret served to clarify. At its heart, it’s a character piece, and like Blue is the Warmest Color- perhaps its closest contemporary on this list- it is also a film that centres around disappointments and let-downs. Lisa is disappointed that her quest for justice has been in vain. She’s been brought up in a world that’s told her that she can achieve anything if she puts her mind to it and is willing to put in the time and effort, especially if she’s got moral rectitude behind her, and she’s undergone a rude awakening. The horse-riding holiday she mentions several times and is clearly looking forward to doesn’t transpire, something which this extended cut points out far more clearly and which, when considering the circumstances of the accident, adds another acute layer of absurd cruelty to Monica’s death. Joan is disappointed that the great reviews she’s received for her acting haven’t brought the gratification she hoped they would, haven’t made her home life any more bearable, and haven’t elicited her daughter to take any interest in either this success or her new partner Ramon. The teenage Darren is disappointed that he can’t win Lisa over either, and that he has come up against a situation in which logic and debate skills mean nothing. Matthew Broderick’s teacher character is disappointed that his students aren’t engaging with his class the way he would like them to. Supplementary to these disappointments is the idea that your life can end at any time- one moment you’re crossing the street on the way to your next appointment, then suddenly you’re lying in the street bleeding to death with a leg missing, spending your final moments out of your mind and surrounded by random strangers. 

These characters are lonely. They can’t connect. They don’t see exactly what they’re doing wrong, but things just won’t fall into place. It’s not logical to be lonely in a city that’s teeming with so many people, so they push these feelings away and tell themselves they’re being silly. Lisa is asked several times why the bus accident has taken such centre stage in her life, and her answers are generally quite vague (though she alludes to feelings of personal responsibility at one point). It’s clear to this viewer that focusing on the event is filling a hole in Lisa’s life. She doesn’t appear to have many friends, especially close ones. It’s never mentioned what employment area she wants to go into- she probably doesn’t know. She’s living a life of emptiness and uncertainty, despite her feisty demeanour, and she hates it, and the bus accident has given her life temporary purpose. It’s also possible that she has somewhat felt her own death through the broken, incoherent visage of Monica Patterson, whose life she physically felt ebb away, whose blood she subsequently had to shower out of her hair. Lisa’s eventual death is unlikely to be as violent or as public as Monica’s, but it could quite easily be just as sudden, and even if it’s not, in the end, we all go the same way.

You Can Count on Me (2000)

If a film is described as ‘like a Made-for-TV movie’, what does that mean?

It’s obviously a derogatory term, and speaking broadly, it seems we all have a pretty good idea of what it connotes: the production values are cheap, the acting isn’t very good and the tone of the piece is treacly. There is probably some moralising message at the centre of the film that is hammered home, and there is very little, if any, artistry involved. It aims low, at a decidedly undemanding and easily satisfied target audience. It’s the kind of film that can, and has been, churned out in the dozens with most of them being completely, and deservedly, forgotten.

In the past, I’ve used the term when talking about two films that were on the BBC’s 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century- David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence and Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret, the latter of which I described, at least initially, as ‘a little glossy, a little overcooked, kinda like a Lifetime TV movie’. In neither case did I try to ‘explain’ or pinpoint exactly what a Made-for-TV movie was- I didn’t feel like I had to. It’s only now, when I am engaging with this term for a third time, that I feel I should provide something of a working definition.

If a film is good- and if it’s on the 100 Greatest Films of the 21st Century, voted for by 177 professional critics, then one presupposes that it must be good on some level or another, even if I don’t personally like it- and it looks and feels a bit like a Made-for-TV movie, then it must have something else to offer, something different. I struggled to see what that might be with A History of Violence, which I thought was an OK, brooding actiony piece but little more. Margaret was a bit of a different beast- much longer than A History of Violence, especially in its uncut form, much talkier with no thriller elements, and containing multiple sustained references to the highbrow cultures of theatre and opera.

When it comes to You Can Count on Me (which received several votes in the BBC poll, and was not far from making the Top 100 list), again it all feels a bit like a Made-for-TV movie, leaving me to wonder if this is writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s prevailing artistic vision- to take the dynamics of movies that are generally cheap and disposible and emotionally dishonest, then massage them, subvert them if necessary, and turn them into something far more respectable and far more recognisable as genuine and worthwhile artistic endeavour. If so, then central to these aims, I assume, is the employment of actors who are absolutely miles removed from the ‘made-for-TV’ movie world in terms of both fame and skill. A History of Violence did this with Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris and William Hurt. Margaret boasted- rather impressively- Matt Damon, Jean Reno, Mark Ruffalo, Matthew Broderick and Allison Janney among its ensemble cast, all playing relatively modest supporting roles. You Can Count on Me, made five years before Margaret, has Ruffalo and Broderick too, both playing more prominent characters, and centred around Laura Linney’s put-upon single mother.

The plot, such as it is, of You Can Count on Me is of the Made-for-TV movie ilk. A thirtysomething woman, Sammy, struggles to bring up her young son alone while dealing with numerous things life has thrown at her- along with the orphanism she suffered as a child, she now has problems at work, problems with her dull relationship, problems with her walkabout drifter brother Terry who has just come back into her life and finally, problems with her religious faith. The leafy small town in which the film takes place also feels recognisable as a mainstay of the Made-for-TV movie. It can be used, if need be, as emblematic of simple community virtue, a paragon of wholesomeness, in direct contrast to the harsh black smoke of the big city. Lonergan doesn’t follow this framework- as expected, his take is more balanced. While the town appears perfectly pleasant for the most part, and the people welcome Terry back and appear genuinely pleased to see him, Lonergan also emphasises the suffocation of living in a town where nothing ever changes, and everyone knows your business and they see nothing wrong with snitching. Terry openly dislikes the place and has no intention of staying, and he is not portrayed as being wrong to think these things at all.

If this were a lesser piece, Sammy and Terry would probably have all sorts of growing and learning to do, and her eight year-old son’s dance recital or big football game would be its climactic set-piece. Terry would realise that this place had everything he ever needed and he would stay. Instead, the two of them are in their thirties and don’t in fact need to particularly grow, or necessarily learn anything- not even Terry who looks like he’s wasting his life and initially fits the archetype of the aimless leeching wastrel. Lonergan embraces richness of character and exhibits a good ear for dialogue. There are a lot of arguments, and rarely is one party completely right and the other completely wrong.

Across the course of the film, Sammy and Terry will both behave selfishly and both of them will make idiot decisions. Like we all do, basically. Sammy’s bad choices are more under-the-radar and less overtly childish than Terry’s, but they are still objectively idiotic- one of them is to try to impose religion upon Terry, who has already told her clearly and astutely that he isn’t interested in that kind of thing and doesn’t want it. Lonergan himself steps in to play the part of the priest- a reasonable man who understands that people don’t always behave with ecclesiastical purity in the modern world and is reluctant to wield clerical condemnation on them. He sees his position as being one of guidance and counsel rather than power and control.

Matthew Broderick, as Sammy’s boss, was the weakest link, I felt. Like the other people in the film, he is not playing someone who is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ but instead has a complex inner life and exhibits a mixture of likeable and unlikeable qualities at various points. With the possible exception of a minor character played by Josh Lucas, one feels that Broderick’s is the one who is meant to be the most unsympathetic, and that of course does not help his case, but I’ve always found Broderick to have a strained and inauthentic screen presence- he never seems completely comfortable in his role, and he never seems to fully settle into his character’s skin. I also feel like he gives pretty much the same performance in everything- he’s the same person in You Can Count On Me as he was in Alexander Payne’s Election, and he’s the same person as he was in The Cable Guy. He’s the same person he was in Inspector Gadget, except not a cyborg.

Never mind. The movie was a satisfying experience- one which was considered, well-judged, well-rounded and mature. It was heartwarming and uplifting without being too mawkish, and it was sad without being manipulatively maudlin. At a tidy 100 minutes, it was also much less sprawling than Margaret, with far fewer subplots, and felt like more of a focused, contained piece.