It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you long for.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins
Now that I've seen the extended version of Longeran's Margaret I'm impressed with the multi-layered beauty of the film. The essential story of Lisa (Anna Paquin) trying to deal with the death of a woman, Monica (Allison Janey) who was crossing the street and was hit and killed by a bus because teenager Paquin distracted the bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) is also a complex story of New York post-9/11. The extended version fills in some narrative gaps about Lisa's relationship with her divorced mother Joan (J. Smith-Cameron), her teacher Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon) and Monica's friend Emily (Jeannie Berlin), as Lisa tries to deal with her grief and guilt about the death of Monica. At one point private-school-student Lisa travels to Bay Ridge to confront the bus driver at his home and get him to admit his role in Monica's death, only to annoy the driver, who is worried about losing his job and his ability to support his family, emphasizing the gulf between the classes in New York.
The film is the most operatic film I've seen since the films of Sergio Leone, with its heightened emotion, its beautiful score by Nico Muhly and its use of actual operas at Lincoln Center, especially Joan and Lisa dissolving in tears at The Tales of Hoffman. Margaret is rather jagged -- more like life as it is lived and the result of Longeran's detailed script, which is followed closely in the extended version. Longeran's use of sound is innovative and fascinating, as he often does not separate completely the sound of conversation from other conversations going on around it. Cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski's color cinematography captures the complex beauty of New York and its denizens and motor vehicles, with effective "pillow shots", cutaways that don't serve a literal narrative purpose but capture a hemmed-in quality of buildings, especially skyscrapers.
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