Event

MARGARET

Vic Skolnick SUNDAY SCHMOOZE Brunch, Film, and Discussion
Join Sunday Schmooze host Fred Craden for a screening and discussion of Kenneth Lonergan's powerful drama about a New York teenager whose life is transformed by a bus accident.

Writer/director Kenneth Lonergan's last film was You Can Count On Me which opened to general acclaim back in 2000 and garnered two Oscar nominations. In 2005 Lonergan shot his follow up film, Margaret, starring a pre-True Blood Anna Paquin and a supporting cast of indie all-stars. Lonergan then spent years in the editing room battling with producers over its running time (there was rumored to be a four-hour cut). Margaret, whose title is derived from
the poem "Spring and Fall: To a young child" by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is a film of risk-taking ambition that deserves its due as a fascinating and often wrenching drama of moral crisis in post-9/11 New York. One of the most controversial films of last year and in some critics' estimation, one of the best, Margaret centers on Lisa (Paquin) a 17-year-old New Yorker who witnesses and perhaps plays a part in causing a bus accident that kills a woman. Though she is smart and self-aware, this is the first time that Lisa has really been exposed to the raw viscera of life and death and it affects her deeply. She begins to lash out emotionally at her family and herself while trying to reconcile her belief that she is somehow responsible for the crash. Margaret is a remarkably human, powerfully acted, film. The acting alone is worth the price of admission, beginning with Anna Paquin as Lisa, and continuing through J. Smith-Cameron as her mother, Matt Damon and Matthew Broderick as two of her teachers, Mark Ruffalo as the bus driver, and, above all, Jeannie Berlin, who practically steals the movie with an indelible performance as the dead woman's justice-seeking best friend. (USA, 2011, 150 min., color, 35mm)
Sunday, October 28 Bagel Brunch at 10am Film at 11am
Followed by Discussion with Fred Craden