Review: Margaret

It's never a good sign when a film spends over five years between production and release, and Margaret, writer/director Kenneth Lonergan's follow-up to You Can Count on Me, is a classic example of why. No amount of star power in its cast can redeem this confused tale of consequences and affluent angst.

Lisa Cohen (Anna Paquin) is a spoiled teen whose self-centeredness contributes to a fatality, and emphasizes her disaffected life with an equally narcissistic mother and a father distracted by his new life in California. In theory, Lisa's life implodes, but little that happens in the movie shows any real difference between the before and the after. Instead, Lonergan's script alienates with the sheer banality of upper middle class life in New York City.

Heavy on urban landscapes and talking heads, the cinematography is as oppressively monotonous as the editing once the title montage ends. Lonergan squanders every moment in Margaret, and with a 149-minute running time, that's a lot of time wasted for very little payoff.

Paquin may have been one of the youngest actors to be nominated for an Academy Award, but in Margaret it's evident she peaked early. Her performance is so self-conscious it's distracting. But she's not alone -- not even Allison Janney is able to completely pull off a believable performance, but in fairness, a lot of it has to do with the overabundance of stilted dialogue best suited for an off-off-off-Broadway stage. Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, Jean Reno and Matthew Broderick all have walk-on roles that don't really add anything to the story, and only emphasize the lack of cohesion in the movie.

The one remotely authentic scene in Margaret occurs when Lisa's father (played by Lonergan) is constantly interrupted by his new wife during a phone call with his daughter. Like everyone else in Margaret, the stepmother is as self-absorbed as everyone else. It's attempting to re-imagine Tom Wolfe's book The Bonfire of the Vanities for the new millennium, where the focus is less on ambition and more on emotion and assuaging guilt.

On an intellectual level, Margaret makes a certain obscured point. But as a watchable film, Margaret is about as interesting as watching paint dry.