'Margaret' on crash course
07.10.11
Paquin plays Lisa Cohen, daughter of a Broadway actress (J. Smith-Cameron, Lonergan’s wife). Lisa’s a private school student whose playful flirtation with a city bus driver (Mark Ruffalo of “You Can Count on Me”) proves distracting enough that he runs a red light, mowing down a woman (Allison Janney) who subsequently dies — with much arterial spray — in the arms of a shaken Lisa as horrified pedestrians look on.
An overemotive and articulate 17-year-old, Lisa’s too young to process the emotions this terrible trauma has unleashed, and if Lonergan was able to make sense of her inner strife on the page, it most certainly was lost in this cut. (Lonergan lost control of his film while still editing in ’08; he’s currently embroiled in a lawsuit with one of the surviving producers.) What survived, however, was her precocious teenager’s narcissism, as she makes herself the center of the horrifying accident.
“I care about this,” she screams in a histrionic fit to the victim’s indifferent, money-grubbing relatives, “because something like this has never happened to me before!”
Source: Boston Herald