Margaret’s Upper West Side Story
Trapped somewhere in the red tape of independent filmmaking between money and marketing, Anna Paquin delivers a very fine performance in the very odd starring role of a very bewildering film called Margaret. Written and directed by the excellent award-winning playwright Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count on Me), which is one of its major draws, it was filmed in 2005, tied up for years in lawsuits, and hindered by the deaths of its two most illustrious producers, Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack. Six years later and 30 minutes shorter, it is finally being released in limited runs as a 2½-hour art film that is something of a well-intentioned mess. In the time between shooting Margaret, editing it down from its original three-hour director’s cut and Anna Paquin’s emergence in True Blood, we watched her grow up from troubled teenager to vamping vampire. Some things are better off left unchanged. Read More
