Margaret

Adolescence and city living, in the ultimate limited release

Margaret is about Lisa (Anna Paquin), a 17-year-old student from a well heeled part of New York, and the people around her. The story is ignited by an accident, when Lisa distracts a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) who then misses a red light and kills a woman. The bus driver is not punished and Lisa resolves to bring him to justice, pulling in and arguing with an interesting supporting cast, including her mother (J. Smith-Cameron), her geometry teacher (Matt Damon), and the dead woman's best friend (Jeannie Berlin).

Margaret's tiny release comes after it spent years languishing in post-production hell, the subject of various lawsuits. The film is long, and director Kenneth Lonergan was under pressure to produce a two-hour cut. The released version is a compromise at two and a half hours. Unfortunately this compromise can show, although what remains is still a beautiful study of relationships in a large city.

Everybody's talkin' at me.

At the centre of the film is Anna Paquin's performance, which is tremendous. It is an honest examination of the contradictions of late adolescence – the invisible line trod between confidence and vunerability, assurance and naivety. Lisa does the wrong thing more than once, and she is at times easy to dislike, truculent and opinionated. But the fragile remnants of childhood persist in Paquin's portrayal as a dully attractive glow. I was reminded of Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan more than once.

Although Lisa is trying to assert herself in the adult world of New York City, she is not an adult; it is a fact she has to confront repeatedly. She may be the dominant force in her ethics class or with her awkward admirer Darren (John Gallagher Jr., who I would have enjoyed seeing more of), but more often she finds herself dealing with figures of authority, almost powerless. There are teachers, policemen, lawyers, and eventually the machinations of a corporate-led legal system. She sees her reasoning as obvious, but she is shouted down or brushed aside. Perhaps she is overly dramatic; perhaps she is just too young.

Of course, New York is more than a city – it is a sprawling metropolis. Much of the film's drive comes not just from the relationships between the characters, but how they interact with and respond to the urban environment. From the opening shot onwards, we return to images of crowds jostling in the street and look up at skyscrapers reflected in skyscrapers. Spaces referred to outside of New York seem out of reach: Lisa's father's Californian beach house, her teacher's Indiana upbringing, a planned excursion to New Mexico.

Meanwhile, the city is cluttered and busy; at one point Lisa remarks how many people must be living in one block. Lonergan shows us a place where it is difficult to make oneself heard, and where a stage actress's daughter from the Upper West Side is out of her depth visiting a bus driver's family home.

Sequences focusing on city life give the plot the space it needs, and unfortunately it is perhaps this space which has suffered from the editorial knife forced on the film. As the end of the film is reached, the plot begins to rattle along, as loose ends are tied up and different strands of the story are crammed together. Meanwhile some subplots, such as Lisa's mother's romance with an admirer (Jean Reno), become stranded without the extra running time. It mars the film and halts its flow, which is a shame.

But Margaret still works, an emotional urban film with a thread of natural humour. It is a haunting portrait of a teenage girl's difficult, sometimes desperate climb to emotional maturity.

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