Margaret
Last night I saw Kenneth Lonergan’s much-delayed follow up to the wonderful You Can Count On Me. The trailer doesn’t fully express how engrossing this movie is and only the second half gets close to encapsulating what the movie is really about. Lonergan deals with the experience of being a teenager in a way that is so on the mark and, as a result, not always easy to watch. Anna Paquin is pitch perfect (even her shortcomings work in her favor) as a typical teenage girl who witnesses — and is partly responsible for — a horrific accident. Through this, Lonergan explores what happens when the already dramatic, histrionic, everything-is-the-end-of-the-world life of an average teenager is jolted by a situation is quite literally life and death. The results are mesmerizing.
