‘Margaret’ brings viewers into troubled characters’ worlds, and New York City (Movie review)

Ostensibly the story of a teenager (Anna Paquin) seeking justice for a woman killed in a bus accident that she feels partly responsible for, “Margaret” (2011) evolves into an immersive treatise on people’s inherent inability to relate to one another and recognize the ways they can make other people miserable. It plays wonderfully as a DVD rental, as the two-and-a-half-hour running time allows for breathers every now and then.

Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, “Margaret” was filmed in the mid-2000s and features Paquin before she started dating vampires. I’m a fan of hers, but not particularly of “True Blood,” so it’s awesome to see her in a starring role as Big Apple prep school student Lisa. (Although successful from a young age, Paquin played surprisingly few main characters before the TV series.) She showcases a wide range of emotions, whether getting into yelling matches with her theater actress mom, Joan (J. Smith-Cameron), or debating politics in class or being frustrated with the legal system or being vulnerable or quasi-vulnerable in relationships with boys and men.

The bus accident and its aftermath jump-start Lisa’s coming-of-age story — which features predictable threads about sex and parental issues and school problems, but in intimate, believable ways. It’s as if Lisa realizes life can be snatched away in an instant, so she starts behaving recklessly, acting rather than pausing to think. Lonergan’s direction and pacing, though, is reflective, as the gorgeous transitional scenes of NYC at various times of day are held just a beat longer than is the norm (the film’s good enough that it earns the extra beat).

Furthermore, although Lisa — reasonably bright and worldly for her age — is aware of the phenomenon in general, even commenting on it at times, she’s not totally aware of how she affects other people’s lives. There’s a great scene, for example, of a classmate who nervously calls her. When she dismissively says she doesn’t feel like talking, we see a quick shot of him crying, realizing he has no chance of connecting with the girl he loves.

Meanwhile, Mark Ruffalo — with much less screen time than Paquin — makes an impression as the bus driver who knows deep down he was wrong, but won’t man up to it — which is understandable because he has a family to take care of and all that. Somewhat amusingly considering that he was Ferris Bueller, Matthew Broderick plays a literature instructor whose inside-the-box Shakespeare analysis is completely shattered by a free-thinking student.

Matt Damon also plays a teacher who has a rather truncated arc that overlaps with Lisa’s (I wonder if this was something that got trimmed from the director’s original cut, which was a half-hour longer). And Jeannie Berlin plays the best friend of the dead woman, Monica (Allison Janney, in a harrowing death scene), in a brusque New Yawker manner that further defines the setting.

Jean Reno plays Ramon, the man whom Joan is dating, and their relationship is a great illustration of Lonergan’s daring knack for spending a lot of screen time on a relationship that doesn’t quite connect. You hear a lot about actors having chemistry, but what’s impressive here is that Ramon and Joan don’t click, although Ramon seems to think they do. You don’t often see such a relationship so honestly portrayed.

As “Margaret” luxuriates in the mundane, lump-in-the-throat pain of misfired couplings and conversations that devolve into loud disagreements, one could argue that it also trivializes things that could be the centerpiece of another movie, such as abortion. That might be partially due to things lost in the final edit, but I’d argue that there’s so much going on in this movie that everything is trivialized more than it should be, and that’s actually the comment Lonergan wants to make.

“Margaret” has a strong central thread about the bus crash, and it also works as a montage of slices of life. However, the film’s beautiful coda ties things together nicely.

Fans of Paquin and well-crafted films who are forever mystified by the nature of human interaction (as I am) will find “Margaret” to be not only a great rental, but also a movie that sticks with them awhile. Retroactively, it’s easily in my top 10 of 2011.