Margaret

So, I saw this little gem from Redbox because it was an indie movie starring Anna Paquin, Mark Ruffalo, Allison Janney, Kieran Culkin, Matthew Broderick, and Matt Damon. The secret True Blood fan inside of me won out and I rented the movie. Thank goodness I only spent 1$ on this movie. It's a little sleeper from writer/director Kenneth Lonergram. I'm sorry, did I say 'little'? I meant it's a 2.5 hour sleeper from the same writer of Gangs of New York, I should've known. Technically it's a movie from 2011 that found it's way to 14 theaters and made a whole $14,000, just missing the mark of it's $14 million budget.

The story centers around Lisa, a 17 year old school girl played by Paquin, who witnesses a tragic bus accident in which a woman dies. She lies to the police about the circumstances of the accident in order to save Mark Ruffalo's job. She later has a change of heart and sets out to right her wrong.

The premise of the story, not to mention the impressive cast, gives the movie a really great foundation to start with. Unfortunately, the story was all over the place during the two and half hours of drama and dialogue. If the story had been greatly condensed and the numerous tangents (I'm not even sure I can call them subplots) removed, the story would have been extremely better. I should probably give some backstory to this whole fiasco called a movie. Everything was shot back in 2005, but for some reason Lonergram could not/would not finish editing the darn thing. Two law suits and a depleted budget later, he finally passed the job off to someone else who, from what I can tell, just put everything they got on film into a semi-sequential order. Hence the lengthy running time. Obviously, something happened after the filming of this movie that just ruined the entire thing. The story felt like an adapted play, in the way the characters were not tied to their environments and there was an incredible amount of dialogue. As good as Broderick was in the movie, his character needed to be completely removed from the story. He had no point in either advancing the plot of bringing anything to the story. The same can be said of the father of the main character.

Obviously, the editing had many issues. It seriously felt like they just put the scenes in order and called it a day. It's also apparent they had given up on the soundtrack, color correction, and pretty much everything else in post.

The actors did a pretty good job. Before I found out the movie was shot in 2005, I was pretty impressed that Paquin played a teenager so well, but now that's void. She did have some nice heavy scenes in which she did a great job. Allson Janney was also pretty spectacular in her four minutes of screen time.

So apparently, something went completely awry after the filming of this movie. If things had panned out as the director had hopefully originally planned, this could have been a decent drama. Unfortunately, it was a complete mess of a movie. "Because, this isn't an opera! And we are not all supporting characters to the drama of your amazing life!"