Margaret, a masterpiece?

To be 17 again. What a nightmare that would be. Teenagers, through no fault of their own, are generally awful people. By 17, you’d think the worse would be over but watching Kenneth Lonergan’s much ballyhooed Margaret yesterday confirmed for me that sometimes, the worst is yet to come.

First, though, a few notes on Margaret’s production:

Last month, Joel Levell for The New York Times Magazine wrote a pretty breathless piece of sycophancy about Margaret, the so-called masterpiece from critic darling Kenneth Lonergan that no one got to see because issues over whittling down the originally three hour long film to a more manageable 150 minutes were too much to bear. The film, shot in 2005–a lifetime ago, you’ll discover if you watch, was finally released for public consumption last year, but Longeran was so disappointed by that version that, encouraged by a few film critics who clamored for the release of the real thing, ‘ Lonergan went ahead and screened the near-three hour version, soon to come in DVD form, at New York’s Landmark Theater for critics and the public this past Monday. Read the rest of this entry »