Thursday night I was walking with my parents on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. A woman walking behind us wearing a fake fur and with very, very blond hair, was talking in a normal voice on her phone, and we heard her say: “You never had a brain tumor so you wouldn’t know.”
The woman kept up with us, or we with her, for a couple blocks, exchanging positions, walking with the crowd and with the stoplights. We talked about her as she continued talking on her phone. I’d been in Chicago for two days, spent a lot of time on the El, remarking to myself how quiet all the public spaces were, how few people looked at each other, and listening to the things people say that you wouldn’t hear anywhere else. My favorite interaction by far was when I was on the train with a CTA driver who was wearing a uniform of his own making: blue-and-white striped overalls and a matching engineer/conductor hat, just like a character from a children’s book. A young African American guy boarded the train, smiled at him, and said as he moved into the car: “That’s a show stopper right there.” City as moving poem.
Kenneth Lonergan’s film Margaret is full of these moments. As Anna Paquin’s character, 17-year-old Lisa Cohen, moves through Manhattan, and as the camera follows her at various distances, we hear a number of outsized conversations, some of which seem important but most of which seem banal — and all of which are unconnected to the main drama of the film.
The main drama but by no means the only drama is this: Lisa’s interaction with a bus driver (played by Mark Ruffalo) leads to an accident in which a woman’s leg is severed. The woman bleeds out in Lisa’s arms, leaving Lisa confused and covered with blood. Lisa lies about what happened in order to protect the bus driver, at the encouragement of her mother (adults in her life are very morally problematic) and, one imagines, because of her own guilt over her part in the accident. She spends the rest of the film more or less trying to recover her story from that lie and figure out what the event “means” in her life.
Like all of us, she wants to be the heroine in her own life story. She wants to be an adult and also desperately wants connection. At the same time, she pushes away her actress mother Joan (played by J. Smith-Cameron) in some of the most heart-wrenchingly real mother-daughter interactions I’ve ever seen on film. She is both harsh beyond reason and a “bestie” to her mother, and the result is a fraught relationship that both offers Lisa her best chance at meaningful connection and frustrates both of their attempts to be simultaneously individual and close. Isn’t that the paradigm for mother/teen daughter angst?
Like most teenagers, Lisa knows a lot about drama but nothing about intimacy. She betrays her mother’s simple attempts at intimacy again and again, alternately contemptuous and indifferent. However, her mother has her own life, a complicated one, and Lisa’s independence is both admirable and dangerous. Intervention is triggered by something quite cliche: the bad report card. These two are so unmoored, however, the roles are hard to maintain: what is the mother’s responsibility? How is a teen daughter supposed to behave? Then there are the men — what are their roles and responsibilities? What can be expected from them, including a father (played by Lonergan) in Santa Monica making contact through awkward phone calls? Lisa’s younger brother is completely un-parented and even the film doesn’t seem to care.
One of the great recurring motifs in the film is a series of teen conversations in classes and in theater rehearsal where the teachers set them up and turn them loose on each other. The precocious know-it-alls with shallow but emotionally-packed relationships to their cultural identities have at it and tear each other to shreds. The teachers are completely ineffectual referees.
Important, traumatic things happen to Lisa throughout the film. The inability and awkward attempts to talk about these things, to make them the basis of relationship with others, and to live fully in “real life,” whatever that is, makes a mess of Lisa’s psyche and she spirals out of control. It’s beautiful and challenging and riveting for every minute of the three hours.
On Thursday night in Chicago, my parents and I were on our way to theLookingglass Theater to see the play Mr. and Mrs. Pennyworth. This play is also about stories — life stories and the stories we hear from the time we can make sense of language, the foundational myths and fairy tales of all the cultures of the world. When one of the characters in that mythic world, a character with a very, very difficult story, goes into a rage and kills the big, bad wolf, chaos is unleashed. In fixing the story tale universe, however, the eponymous couple face their own sorrows and the difficulties of life. It’s so much more powerful than you thought a story about fairy tales could be. Leaving the theater, a precocious young woman behind me said to her boyfriend, or maybe he was just a friend: “I hate you right now.” He asked, “Because I brought you here and now you’re feeling feelings?” “Yes,” she answered.
Lisa Cohen’s world is a mess. And so is ours. In a city you can easily feel pressed up against so many lives — and what does it all mean? A first encounter with death, even the death of a stranger, can be hard to fit into the narrative. When I was 17, working at a cafeteria-style steakhouse in suburban Chicago, I waited on a man who died more or less in my arms. The encounter was very deep for me — I was thankfully attentive enough not to drop the food and walk away. We spoke a bit without speaking, as his heart attack had already begun. I think he came to that restaurant so as not to die alone. Maybe that’s just me being grandiose. I believed he wanted me to stay with him instead of going for help. And I did.
I know that after grieving that stranger I decided not to cry again unless someone died. By the end of my freshman year in college I was a dissociated mess. I was in Lisa Cohen’s world, filled to the brim with connections I could not organize or assemble or figure the meaning of. I would say those questions consumed my life more or less for the next decade.
Lonergan’s film is brilliant. There was a long struggle to bring this film out in its current, 3-hour-long director’s cut version. Watching it, I thoroughly understand that it could not be cut any other way; in each decision about how long a scene should go, and what should be heard or not heard or overheard or pantomimed, was the whole meaning of the film.
I saw the film by Lonergan getting all the Oscar hype this year, Manchester by the Sea. That film has good performances and a good script. What I said after watching it was that, unlike so many films that rest on “a secret,” the secret here was of the proper type and magnitude to justify the drama the film depends on for its meaning. But that film is child’s play compared toMargaret. You wanna know what it means to be human? Watch Margaret.
Note: This review is also available on Medium. Click here to visit the site. I‘ll be posting my essays on film over there. Cowbird.com is closing down (it will still be available as an archive, but no new stories can be posted). I’m exploring other platforms to share my writing.