“Spring and Fall” by Gerard Manley Hopkins — which begins
(accent marks signifying Hopkins’s artificial or “sprung”
rhythm)
Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
—
is probably his most famous poem and the one that, if you know
anything about Hopkins, you must have heard and admired. But for
all its admirable qualities, it sounds rather cynical and
solipsistic. Musically it definitely has something to be said for
it, but the conclusion in particular seems a bit too neat. Death,
change, transition, the passage of time, all these are the “It”
which, the poem tells us, are “the blight man was born for,” but if
Margaret is cast into melancholy reflection or even grief by these
things, then to go on to say as the poem’s last line does that “It
is Margaret you mourn for” suggests the girl is, as we all are,
trapped in the prison of self. Surely, it’s not just
Margaret she mourns for?
For most people, in fact, it is not even primarily
themselves they mourn for. When we lose something or someone we
love and mourn the loss, it is the thing or person lost which is
the object of our mourning, if you want to call it that. We mourn
for ourselves only in the banal sense that we are the ones who have
suffered the loss. That’s not at all the same thing as saying we’re
mourning for ourselves. But then Margaret may have been,
as Kenneth Lonergan’s movie Margaret hints she was, not
like most people, or most mature people anyway. Her youth implies
to him that youthful quality of self-dramatization to be found in
those like his film’s heroine — named Lisa (Anna Paquin), not
Margaret — who have not yet learned to find the borders between
themselves and their experiences.
Lisa’s central experience is not exactly what you’d call
mourning, because the person lost, an older woman named Monica
(Allison Janney), was unknown to her until the moment of her death
under the wheels of a bus whose driver (Mark Ruffalo) Lisa had
distracted with a girlish question about a hat. Vaguely troubled by
guilt and not wishing to get the driver in trouble, she lies to the
police in her initial testimony (“Think of it like a movie,” the
cop instructs her) and says that the red light we know the driver
ran while being distracted was green. Later she has pangs of
conscience about her lie and determines, by changing her story, to
get the driver fired. Her struggle to this end — with the police,
the legal system, Monica’s distant cousin in Arizona who is her
next of kin and the feisty friend and executor Emily (Jeannie
Berlin) who has no interest in being Lisa’s second mother — takes
place in the context of the usual allowance of troubles, growing
pains, and everyday traumas of a clever and attractive high school
senior.
Though it was released last September, Margaret has
only recently made it to a cinema near me. The delay is just the
latest of the misfortunes suffered by this picture, which was shot
seven years ago and then ran into production and legal difficulties
such that Variety
has called it a film maudit. The critical raves which
greeted. Mr Lonergan’s directorial debut, You
Can Count On Me (2000) may have tempted him into the
over-ambitiousness that is evident throughout the film’s
much-too-long 150 minutes. For although its subject is basically an
ordinary kid, if an attractive, intelligent, and privileged one,
learning the ordinary lessons of maturity, albeit in unusual
circumstances, Mr. Lonergan seems to have been wrestling from the
beginning with what he thought of as an epic, a portrait of
American urban culture and society in the first decade of the 21st
century. Consequently, the movie is like its heroine in trying to
do too much. It piles on more weight of incident, character, and
meaning than its slender theme will bear.
At one point Emily says to Lisa, “This isn’t an opera! And we
are not all supporting characters to the drama of your amazing
life.” For a moment or two this seems to promise some way through
the chaos, a way to relate Lisa’s adolescent self-dramatization to
the rather operatic motifs — including opera itself — that the
ambitious Mr. Lonergan has added to it, but it is a promise that is
never quite fulfilled. The moral maze that Lisa must negotiate has
far too many twists and turns, and it eventually becomes as
fatiguing to us as it evidently is to her. She is not a very
likable character herself, at least until the end, and there are so
many other centers of interest in the film only tangentially
related to her and her struggles that our attention is constantly
being distracted.
These distractions include her relationship with her actress
mother Joan (J. Smith-Cameron) and Joan’s relationship with her new
boyfriend, an opera-loving Colombian diplomat named Ramon (Jean
Reno). In addition, there are ambiguous relations between Lisa and
two different male classmates and another two of her teachers,
played by Matthew Broderick (the Hopkins quoter) and Matt Damon, at
the expensive Manhattan private school she attends, not to mention
those with the bus driver and her distant father (played by Mr.
Lonergan himself) now remarried and living on the West Coast. All
of this, together with the personal injury lawsuit against the bus
company that Lisa, Emily, and the Arizonan cousin all see in such
different lights, is meant to take place against the backdrop of
terrorism and America’s response to it in the wake of 9/11, which
inspires a raging discussion involving Lisa and others in one of
her classes.
You will, perhaps, see what I mean about the film’s trying to do
too much. Any one of these things could make an interesting subject
for a film in itself but, taken all together, they produce an
aesthetically and emotionally wearying effect. Yet in spite of its
excesses and the structural problems they create, anyone with the
patience to sit through Margaret will be rewarded with
much that is worth watching, so talented is the director and his
splendid cast. In some ways, even the chaos and indiscipline have
their own contributions to make to the film’s portrait of moral
confusion and rootlessness. That may be why the emotional power of
its closing scene, set to the barcarolle “Belle nuit, ô nuit
d’amour” from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann as sung by
Renée Fleming and Susan Graham, is so great. It reminds us that
drama, and even melodrama, still have their uses, so long as we do
not make Margaret’s (and Lisa’s) mistake and think that they’re all
about us.
