This film is just a mess, possibly the worst directed film I've ever seen. The camera work doesn't match the music or the scene, the dialogue is all over the place and the actors that should have led this film are given just a few lines, Matt Damon is hardly in the movie at all, Mark Matthew Brodrick even less. The plot has no real direction and different little sub plots cross over all the way through. It's almost as if it was filmed over a real life time scale and there is no cut in time, the film could have been half the running time and have the same effect. You don't actually find out the aim of the plot until about 2 hours in. If you want to waste 3 hours of your life I suppose it's marginally better than watching paint dry.

I made two mistakes - selecting this movie to watch and getting the extended cut, which adds an additional 30 minutes to this already too long movie. This is a movie that should be shown to all aspiring script writers - as an example of what not to do. The average script is 100-120 minutes making a movie about 90-110 minutes long. Perhaps with a revised, tighter script, this could have been something. Taking away the background dialog in many of the scenes would be helpful. We get it that in NYC, it's loud, there are always noises surrounding you. The movie does not suffer from a lack of talent, Matt Damon, Mark Ruffo, Allison Janney, Jean Reno to name a few, it's just their skills are wasted in this movie that drags on and on and on and on and on and on - oh, I should write a shorter review? Good idea. This movie is too long and squanders the talent of its stars. It needs more plot, a clearly defined conflict and resolution. 2 stars for the acting skills cleverly hidden in this movie.

Okay, I've been through both edits of this now, after recommendations from several readers. I get what he is trying to do. I am writing as someone who prefers the Cannes edit of Brown bunny and who eagerly sat through 3 1/2 hours of The Falls.I think this is a failure, a failure is the sense that the filmmaker had ambitions that may have been unachievable. What he wanted, I think is to have two films merged. One that carried a narrative that mattered and conveyed transformation. And another that conveyed situation, and not just surroundings but an environment that collectively has agency of the same power. You have to see both edits to see this man's struggle; you can compress the first of these because we have all sorts of narrative enzymes in our digestive system. We can fill in things and often are better off with less.It is also the case that you can make an environmental movie with scant narrative. Greenaway does it all the time. Ruiz. Kar-Wai Wong. And if you are willing to have a smaller, more engaged audience, this is achievable in 150 minutes. What Lonergan wanted to do was to have both and have each drive the other. Moreover, he placed himself and his wife as the contacts, a dual fulcrum between the two.There are so many dynamics that are necessary to bind this, to make all the parts affect each other the way he designed that taking any one out ruins the structure. If you did not know his ambition, a viewer would hardly see anything wrong. The Paquin character is great, as are the surrounding actors. The city, the tone, the environment is as richly presented as the best Woody Allen Manhattan-anchored movie. But the environment does not have the coherent agency it needs to do what he clearly intended.I think we have to have a much longer version than 3 hours to accomplish what he attempted. But gosh, the ambition is admirable and all the pieces I can see are amazingly promising. It is no wonder that first rate talent was eager to participate.

Beautifully written and imaginatively filmed by Kenneth Lonergan, "Margaret" is filled with solipsistic characters obsessed with their hostilities and need to hurt. An impressive Anna Paquin plays Lisa, a New York high school student whose involvement in a fatal bus accident torments her but also allows it to be incorporated into her skewed worldview. It would be easy to condemn Lisa as a privileged, self-righteous teenager except that her world is also being shaped by the people she interacts with who refuse to meet her needs, most notably Emily (Jeannie Berlin), the deceased's best friend, in denial of her own responses; and her mother (J. Smith-Cameron, excellent in a very complex role), an actress starved for attention onstage and off. The cast of supporting characters who exhibit their own self-serving behavior include Matthew Broderick, Jean Reno, Mark Ruffalo, Kieran Culkin and a very fine Matt Damon. Lonergan brings a playwright's precision in both ideas and dialogue to film and, aided by director of photography Ryszard Lenczewski, captures a group of city dwellers so confined in their closed environment that they refuse to believe anything other that what it tells them. (He also plays Lisa's father, removed to the beaches of southern California but still a product of city self-absorption.) Highly recommended.