Margaret
Pieces of Work
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In Margaret, the central character Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) is a piece of work, who is also hard work, a young woman hard to like, and who likes to make the lives of those around her difficult. An early incident doesn’t transform her character, but it does accelerate aspects of it. Director Kenneth Lonergan’s purpose is to entangle a difficult personality within a difficult set of circumstances. Early in the film, mainly set in New York, Lisa sees a bus driver wearing a cowboy hat similar to the one she has been trying to buy, and walks along the pavement determined to get the driver’s attention. She gets it, but he loses his, runs a red light, and a woman crossing loses her life. Lisa is there with her as Monica (Allison Janney) remains conscious for several minutes, and much of the film will concern how conscious Lisa is during the rest of the two-and-a-half-hour running time. She sleeps with one boy whom she allows almost randomly to take her virginity, and rejects another whom she may like more, and whom she kisses at a party. She comes on to a teacher, Aaron (Matt Damon), who stupidly succumbs, and claims, when meeting Aaron, and what may be his partner on the street, that she aborted. It is as though to leave the teacher culpable, without quite saying to Aaron that he would have been the father. Lonergan shows that the film may start with a crash, but Lisa is a car crash all of her own.
Are we being too harsh on this young woman? Not especially so if one imagines someone like Lisa in one’s life, and those trying to handle the constant fallout. Yes, if we try to simplify Lonergan’s attempt to understand a mixed-up kid, a late teen (played by Anna Paquin, who was in her early 20s), who has the emotional maturity of a brat, and the burgeoning sexual poise of someone beyond her years. She is simultaneously seductive and reductive, and Aaron ruefully tells himself, the moment she leaves his apartment after the assignation, that he is a ‘‘fucking idiot.’’ After all, she has just told him that he’s reacting like a little kid as she says she isn’t going to tell anyone, and that she initiated it. Lisa’s word is hardly her bond, and she tells him before they have sex that she has always appreciated that he is ‘‘sympathetic to her craziness.’’
The scene itself comes just after one where she has got hysterical with the friend of the woman, Monica, who died, as they work together to make a case against the bus driver. Lisa says to Emily (Jeannie Berlin) that, as Monica was dying in her arms, she felt as though she had become the daughter Monica had lost many years earlier. (The daughter died of leukaemia at eight) Emily finds this intolerable, and says that what she sees is ‘‘adolescent self-dramatisation’’, a young person who thinks her feelings are of central importance, even if the tragedy is centrally other people’s. The friend has more than a point, but though she insists that she, Monica, and the daughter aren’t all supporting characters in Lisa’s story, this is exactly what they are in Lonergan’s film. Lisa might be a problem, but Margaret puts her at the absolute centre of a work that resembles network narratives, popular a decade or so earlier, but that, unlike such films (Short Cuts, Wonderland, Code Unknown, Yi Yi), doesn’t tell a number of stories as it cuts back and forth between narratives but chiefly one: Lisa’s.
It is true that occasionally the film, in this 150-minute theatrical cut, gives us information to which Lisa wouldn’t be privy, or leaves her briefly behind to concentrate on another character. When her mother starts dating a new man, we see them at the opera together; when Lisa receives a phone call from the boy she kissed, and tells him she hasn’t time to chat, the film cuts to the boy alone in his room, as he bursts into tears. When she talks with her father (Lonergan himself) on the phone, as she speaks of going out to California to visit him, the film spends as much time focusing on him talking to her, from his beachfront apartment, as on Lisa. There are also occasional shots that seem to take us outside Lisa’s story, offering a context greater than her own egotism. It is there when Lonergan cuts from a panning shot of New York at night to a pan in the same direction to the blue of the ocean during the day, as it anticipates Lisa’s phone call to her father. On other occasions, the film focuses on buildings in shots that are more than establishing; they are closer to contemplative moments that ask us to muse over the vastness of New York, and the idea that the story it is telling is just one of many that could be told. It helps bring out Emily’s remarks about Lisa’s emotional hyperbole and her self-centredness. The film may almost exclusively focus on Lisa, but while the cutaways rarely move on to someone else’s life, they often suggest getting a perspective on the one we are focusing upon.
This leads us to the title. Usually, films that are nominally titled suggest a film’s central character rather than a peripheral figure in the story. Jerry Maguire, Erin Brockovich, Serpico, Rocky and Arthur are all about the main characters. Occasionally, a film will throw us a little, or a lot. Klute isn’t the central character; Bree Daniels is, and Klute is the detective she becomes involved with. In Muriel, the title figure is a haunted memory: one of the characters can’t get out of his mind how he was involved in torturing her in Algeria. In Margaret, the title character becomes even more peripheral. She is a figure in Gerald Manley Hopkins’ poem, with the English teacher, John (Matthew Broderick), reading it out to Lisa and the other students. The poem examines a young girl’s strong feelings towards falling leaves that the poem’s narrator suggests will grow weaker with age, and echoes, of course, the conversation she has with Emily, where, after Lisa talks about those last moments with Monica, Emily says that she is seeing things as an opera and that she is young. Lisa reckons that surely, as a young person, she can feel more because she is young, and certain experiences affect her more deeply as a consequence. Emily responds that it isn’t that Lisa cares more; it is that she cares more easily.
The presence of the poem, which leads to Lisa defending herself, may rest partly on how she interprets the poem, and we may find her response facile. But equally, at the end, Lisa and her mum Joan (J. Smith Cameron) do indeed go to an opera, and Lisa becomes, her mother notices, overwhelmed by the experience. She, in turn, tears up, and the film concludes with them hugging, as it moves into an overhead shot of the embrace. If Emily reckons that life is not an opera, Lonergan proposes maybe not, but that doesn’t mean it can’t access emotions life doesn’t quite know what to do with. When the mum asks for a hug earlier in the film, after a tense moment with Lisa, it feels forced: a familial expectation rather than an emotional revelation. While Emily indicates life isn’t an opera, we might need its presence to access feelings that life viewed too directly cannot quite bring out. It may not quite work for Joan, as suggested earlier in the film, when she goes with a new partner, Ramon (Jean Reno), and wonders if many people are reacting as they ought to, rather than based on how they feel. When she says to Lisa during the break that she doesn’t think that much of what they’ve been watching. Lisa disagrees, and we may assume this is yet another moment where she is instigating conflict, but no, she is reacting very strongly, and Joan reacts warmly to her reaction.
While it might seem that Lisa is the film’s troublesome character, the one always generating tensions and acting petulantly, the more we think about it, the more we can see that the film has plenty of characters acting without always concerning others, or out of naked self-interest. Joan can seem like the long-suffering mum, but we should remember it is she who reckons her daughter should tell the police that the light was green rather than red, and who isn’t averse to insulting her daughter back as she calls her a ‘’heartless little bitch.’’ Let’s not pretend this remark doesn’t come unprovoked, but Lonergan’s purpose is surely to say that while Lisa may not yet have grown up, the adults in the room aren’t without their faults, flaws and foibles. In the scene before Emily turns on Lisa over her claims about how close she felt to Monica, we see her looking oddly and aggressively at Lisa when Monica’s cousin, Abigail, asks her what her angle is in all of this. It is as though she were looking for an excuse to turn. It doesn’t mean what she says to Lisa is without validity, but some of it becomes questionable when it appears she is offloading her frustration rather than examining Lisa’s conscience. As for Abigail, while she says when Lisa first makes contact with her on the phone that she had nothing to do with Monica, when it looks like there is money to be made in the court case, she turns up in New York and tells the lawyer that they would speak regularly. Her angle is very clear: she wants money. Even characters who might seem agreeable have their moments. John is the patient teacher trying to guide them through Gerard Manley Hopkins and Shakespeare, but when a student makes a provocative point about Shakespeare meaning something that doesn’t coincide with the teacher’s take, John becomes irate and insists he wants to move on.
If growing up is hard to do, it isn’t made any easier when you witness and feel partly responsible for a terrible accident, and when most of the adults around you have their own irritations, frustrations and tensions to deal with. Lonergan interestingly proposes that Joan might have given Lisa different advice over the red light, if she hadn’t been moments earlier masturbating. Lisa barges into the room in the midst of Joan’s self-pleasuring and, discombobulated, offers the advice she does. She’s just not thinking straight.[...]she misunderstands the question. Joan is trying, but she sort of guesses the wrong answer. It’s her opinion, and it’s sort of this liberal, upper West Side-y type of advice, and it happens to be the exact opposite of what Lisa wants to hear. I thought about that a lot and we talked about it a lot.’’ (Bright WallDarkRoom)
Jean Renoir’s everybody has their reasons, becomes everybody has their irritations and if the film does mainly hold to Lisa’s perspective, it often alludes to the general tensions in and between people. When Lisa gets Abigail on the phone to speak about her aunt’s accident, the woman irritatingly wonders how she got her number and doesn’t want her to phone again. While Lisa tries to placate her, Lisa yells at her younger brother, who is practising piano in the other room. He asks, off-screen, where else can he practice? While Emily might shout at Lisa saying that the various people Lisa knows ‘’are not supporting characters in the fascinating story of your life’’, there is a sense that everyone in the film has their own story because they have their own over-reactions. When Lisa goes and sees the bus driver to discuss what happened, he responds a little as Abigail does on the phone, angrily wondering how she got his address. At a dinner, Lisa, Joan, Ramon and Emily discuss Israel, and Ramon suggests that generally the oppressor regards the oppressed as terrorists, while state violence is legal. Emily throws a glass of water over Ramon after he suggests it, and, as she gets up to leave, says this is the ‘‘Jewish response.’’ Even this apparently most mild-mannered man can get worked up, and this leads to an over-reaction from Joan, who finishes with him. The very argument stems from another Lisa was having that day in class over the Middle East, where she compares a 19-year-old Palestinian to a Nazi, ‘‘because they both like to kill Jews.’’ The class had become a shouting match, and Lisa was asked to leave.
It makes sense with all this overwrought emotion that someone would have a heart attack, and not long after Joan ceases contact with Ramon, she receives a phone call, hears he has had a cardiac arrest, and he passes away soon after. The film cuts from the call to the funeral parlour. At the funeral, his son says that from the moment Ramon met Joan, he knew he wanted to marry her. This might seem like melodrama with too clear a throughline: Joan rejects Ramon after an argument that wasn’t even between them, he has a heart attack shortly afterwards, and his son tells him how important she was to Ramon in a moment that contains irony. The son insists that in Joan, the father had finally met someone with whom he would connect, and there Joan is ’ excommunicating him ’ after a disagreement with someone else. The further irony is that, as Lisa notes, the funeral is taking place at a Jewish parlour, with Joan assuming ‘‘I guess they do both.’’ If Lonergan has melodramatic tendencies, they are countered by his ironic ones, and this gives the film less narrative sprawl than perspectival acuity. It manages to contain all the spats and misfortunes within a plea for a bit of understanding. But while this could have come across as a platitude in a tighter work, it becomes a cry of desperation in one where everybody has their mood swings.
This leads us to two important aspects of the film: one, its production history, the other its theme, though both can be viewed as interconnected. Shot in 2005, Margaret underwent arduous post-production, as the studio, Fox Searchlight, expected a smooth 150-cut, and Lonergan had to contend with other possible versions, both good and ill. Fox Searchlight had its own edit, while Martin Scorsese and Thelma Schoonmaker worked on a 165-minute version. Ultimately, Lonergan himself came up with a 150-minute cut, which was released in theatres in 2011. It was only his second feature film (after You Can Count on Me in 2000) and was followed by a third, Manchester by the Sea in 2015. Margaret should be viewed as a film from the 2000s rather than the 2010s. As Lawrence Garcia says, it's post-9/11 sociopolitical context places it in the last decade (a number of Lisa’s classroom debates revolve around the Iraq War and U.S. involvement in the Middle East).’’ That it was held up for so long might seem like its classroom discussions about the post 9/11 world seem a little misplaced – as if an intervention on the director’s part, rather than a symptom of the times. But, seeing it as a 2005 film, it fits with others around the time: Fahrenheit 9/11, United 93, World Trade Centre and Reign Over Me. It is perhaps the best at understanding that this isn’t just a typical New York array of characters, but a group that would have been traumatised by relatively recent events. How many people witnessing the bus accident would have also known or seen people die only several years earlier in the World Trade Centre? If that seems a speculation too far, it appears a lot less so if we think of the film as a 2005 work, and not from a decade after the Twin Towers attacks.
When Lisa and a fellow student argue loudly about the Palestinian cause and the Jewish presence, Lisa insists that Arabs were happy blowing up the World Trade Centre; she seems to be conflating different issues. She isn’t arguing rationally; she is screaming, as if 9/11 hasn’t gone away and has entered her nervous system. If Karim Townsend can speak of 9/11 allegory in the context of the film, saying Margaret is a ‘‘film whose mediation of the immediate post-9/11 years similarly probes complex questions of mourning, responsibility and grievability’’ (European Journal of American Culture), we might view it as a symptomological exploration, with various characters showing symptoms of trauma that may or may not be directly linked to the World Trade Centre, but can usefully leave us wondering if they might be.
It is where symptomology meets toponymics: when, in the context of the latter, a place becomes known for an atrocity, or atrocities, and can take many years to lose its status as a war zone. These would include Kabul, Baghdad, Beirut, Belfast, and Gaza. In a strict sense, it might be more useful to see 9/11 as chrononymic, if we accept that just as Kabul and Belfast designate a place to define tragic events, then certain dates equally serve this function. 9/11, October the 7th, November 13th, 7/7. No chrononym has the power of 9/11, but, equally, one reason why we attend to the date is that New York is too vast and culturally varied to fall into toponymic singularity. This might be unfair to Belfast and Baghdad, but unlike New York (and Paris and London), the combination of consistent tensions and a less mediated presence more generally leaves Belfast and Baghdad toponymically specific for years, often decades. If someone were to make a film about Belfast in the immediate years after the Good Friday Agreement, it would be understandable that if there were tensions constantly present in the city, we might read it through the events that had preceded the narrative. By locating Margaret as a film from the mid-00s, rather than the 2010s, it is easier to see the characters’ misunderstandings and over-reactions linked to the event, and, if you like, allegorised through the bus crash.
This risks an over-reading, and few things more than allegorical insistence pass for interpretive overload, and risk undermining specific feeling. Anybody who watches the lengthy sequence where we see Monica’s life slowly ebbing away, while at one moment blood spurts from her body, and is thinking instead of 9/11, is denying the specificity of this event that Lonnergan has taken time to film as concretely and dramatically as possible. It is there in the cuts back and forth between Lisa running along the street, and the bus driver looking at her through the door window, before cutting to a green light. It then cuts back to Lisa and the driver, while the light turns orange and then red, as we become aware that this light-hearted moment is going to turn red indeed. The film then shows Monica beginning to cross the street with her shopping trolley, as the film cuts back to the driver, and we see the bus passing through the red light. The film constantly cuts back and forth, showing a terrified medium close up of Monica’s face, and the bus trundling towards her. It is consistent with V. I. Pudovkin’s claims: you don’t just film a long shot of a car hitting a tree. You show all the components of the incident, a full logistics of the tragedy. Moments after Monica has been hit, Lonnergan shows us the driver trying to brake, and we see the wheels go over her shopping trolley, flattening the wheels and splattering the contents. This is dramatically vivid, not simply allegorically allusive.
Yet at the same time, this is one incident that only really involves three people. The bus driver, Emily and Lisa. The bus driver is chiefly responsible, Lisa understandably feels culpable, and Emily, the one who will be grieving her friend. Abigail doesn’t much care until the question of compensation, Joan is more concerned with her play, Aaron and John with their work and their students, and all the while, there is the sense that people aren’t especially attending to Lisa’s predicament. One way of seeing why they aren’t, however horrific Lisa and the audience find the accident, is that this is one small incident within the context of a much greater one that only happened several years before. When Emily says in response to Lisa admitting that she wasn’t the one run over by the bus, that she also wasn’t the one who died of leukaemia, and nor was she the person who just died in an earthquake in Algeria, we might read in her remarks that this tragedy that happened to someone else was relatively minor next to the one that happened several years earlier. The comment about leukaemia is, of course, pertinent: this is how Monica’s daughter died at a young age. However, the remark about Algeria might seem random: there were no major earthquakes in the 2000s in the country. It would have been too on the nose were she to have said that Lisa hasn’t died in a plane careening into a building, but she will be. New York was turned into just another disaster city, another place that had visited upon it, a catastrophe it didn’t expect, and where everyone began to understand tragedy close to hand. To reference an earthquake that never happened, rather than this key incident that did, seems to combine denial with acknowledgement: the denial of the event and the acceptance of it as an emotional reality. This needn’t at all mean we are reading the film as an allegory of 9/11, and turning the bus crash into a metaphor for a far greater disaster. Yet it is to see that the film can be read as a symptomatic exploration of a city still in trauma.
Andrew O’Hehir notes that Margaret ‘’is most definitely a time capsule from George W. Bush’s America’’, while joking both lightly and darkly about its convoluted production history. He notes that when Lisa remarks about the current president, he was left wondering which one: ‘‘Jimmy Carter, Ike, William Howard Taft.’’ He also remarks that the film didn’t lose one producer to death during its production history, but two: ‘‘In the opening credits, Anthony Minghella is listed as a producer of Margaret and Sydney Pollack as an executive producer. Both of those eminent filmmakers have been dead for more than three years.’’ (Salon) Oscar Wilde and carelessness might come to mind. However, this would surely not be because of Lonnergan as a difficult director, and more about the difficulty of making films in America if they have so meandering a throughline. Lonnergan says that ‘‘the emotional story of the film is that of a girl discovering that the world is 100,000 times bigger, deeper, and more complex than she imagined it to be. Which is something we all discover at some point, at some age, or most of us do. So I very much wanted to prove it by having it happen to her, and to the audience as well—and it became obvious, whenever we stuck just with her, when we were editing it, that the structure collapses completely.’’ (Slant) He reckons this is because ‘‘It starts with her, remains with her, and ends with her. And if the movie doesn’t go over to the side of the other characters, as completely as possible, and embrace the size and scope of the city, and the size and scope of the problem she’s trying to solve, then there’s not enough story to sustain our interest.’’ (Slant)
This might have been more acceptable if the film had become one of those network narratives we invoked at the beginning of this piece, and if it had predicated itself on characters trying to sort out their lives in the Big Apple after the collapse of the Twin Towers. But the film becomes neither one thing nor another (neither a sprawling narrative giving due consideration to various figures as it moves from one story to the next and back again, nor a tight drama about a troubled late adolescent who rightftully feels guilty over her involvement in a bus accident). It instead becomes a work that possesses an allusive density, as it not only offers up two operas on screen, but also has, of course, Emily insisting that life itself isn’t one. Yet Lonnergan might be saying that the film is finally closer to an opera than a soap opera, and wishes to explore through one character, and show numerous others on the periphery of her life, getting on with it while engaged in numerous, often petty dramas that bring out the flavour of reality, even if many here have a taste for the piquant. While Lisa may be a piece of work, she is also made of all the bits we find around her: family members, teachers, newfound friends, and others capable of outbursts, inappropriate desires, and communication failures. If Hitchcock insisted that slices of life should be repackaged as narrative pieces of cake, Lonnergan wonders what sort of form he can achieve instead with characters who are all pieces of work.
© Tony McKibbin