DISNEY + – FRIDAY 8 OCTOBER – FILM
Even if a film arrives late, you might as well do it opportunely: Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan’s second feature film (after You Can Count on Me, before Manchester by The Sea), is finally offered to the French public, twenty years after the September 11 attacks. Shot in 2005, released on the sly in 2011 by Fox after a violent conflict between the filmmaker and his producers, Margaret, perfect example of the cursed film, was born from the desire to draw the portrait of a city in the aftermath of a violent trauma.
Lisa Cohen, the young protagonist of Margaret (which borrows its title from a poem by Victorian author Gerard Manley Hopkins), is therefore entrusted with the heavy task of embodying an entire city. Thankfully, once the metaphor is clear, Kenneth Lonergan – who also wrote the film, after all he’s also one of the great American playwrights of the moment – leaves this wonderful teenage character worried, angry, destructive and vulnerable. take off as close as possible to the truth of emotions and impulses.
Caught by a whirlwind
A high school student in a chic establishment on the Upper West Side in New York, Lisa lives with her mother (J. Cameron-Smith, who will soon be playing the role of Gerri in the series Succession) and his little brother. One afternoon of strolling, she is involved in a traffic accident. Gerald Maretti (Mark Ruffalo), a bus driver she’s caught the eye of, runs a red light and – quite literally – crushes a passerby (Allison Janney, in the most terrible and arguably briefest of her performances) who dies in Lisa’s arms.
Hesitant between the desire to exonerate the driver of his responsibility and her concern for justice, Lisa plunges into a legal labyrinth, hoping to find at the end of the road a meaning to the catastrophe which has just turned her life upside down. But a life cannot be reduced to a tragedy. This is the meaning of the impressive work of Kenneth Lonergan and his actors: spreading all the branches of a tree until it in turn becomes a forest.
Lisa’s teachers (who have, among others, the features of Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick), her mother’s new lover (Jean Reno), her classmates (among whom another actor from the Succession, Kieran Culkin), are in turn companions of anguish, obstacles to be destroyed or objects of desire. Lisa has been caught in a whirlwind, the violence of which she struggles to further increase.
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