Margaret

Anna Paquin    w/d Kenneth Lonergan

Powerful, disturbing story. A tour de force performance by AP. This is a dream role for a talented, ambitious actor: she had many emotive scenes with different characters and she was borderline offensive as a person but had to be sympathetic enough to carry the audience along with her on a 2 1/2 hour ordeal.

A young girl is involved in a traumatic event and we watch as she tries to deal with the emotional impact of it, including her own guilt, while being too immature and too arrogant to know what she is dealing with.

The staging of the incident was poor and hurt the rest of the film. That aside, this was a haunting, painful experience for the character and for us but another feather in Lonergan's cap.

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