The Greatest Movie Ever Made That Nobody Ever Saw: “Margaret” (2011)

While I was watching the movie “Margaret” – directed by Kenneth Lonergan and released in 2011 – I heard somebody scream in anguish outside of my apartment building. I was so mesmerized by the movie that I didn’t stand up to see what the problem was. This scream didn’t detract from the movie but rather added to it. “Margaret” is a movie about New York City and gets New York City right in a way few movies ever do. It uses audio to overlap conversations from the main characters and from the people who just happen to be standing near them. It uses the background noises of the city to create this feeling that you are truly there. Finally, it shows just how many humans are stacked on top of each other. The opening of one scene pans from apartment to apartment in an apartment building until we get to the protagonist’s apartment. All of these techniques create a realistic New York City that is claustrophobic, tight, noisy and human. 

“Margaret” is an overwhelming movie. It centers around just one girl (Anna Paquin) but somehow it keeps adding new and interesting characters to her life with their own stories. It rarely pauses to let the stories completely branch out, but it still feels tremendously big. I’ve never seen another movie maintain this contradictory balance of being both small and intimate and huge and powerful.

I remember finishing the movie and staring at the screen in shock. I tried to go back to my regular life but something about it felt so wrong. Like I was just following through with the motions. My hands could be taking notes or working on essays for school, but my thoughts were back to “Margaret”. I thought about each scene so many times that it got slightly harder to distinguish it from my own memories. Something about the movie changed me and I wish that I could describe it but sadly it will only mean something if you actually see it.

When I recommended “Margaret” to a friend and he asked me to describe what it was about I sort of stuttered, struggled for words and ended up saying, “It’s about a teenage girl and something happens to her.” I knew this wasn’t a sufficient explanation but I also realized mid-sentence that just by describing the plot, I was spoiling the movie. I went in knowing nothing and that was definitely the best way to watch it. Something huge happens early in the movie. What happens comes out of nowhere and the shock of it happening is so important for empathizing with the movie’s main character, a teenage girl named Lisa. 

We travel with Lisa before and after this event. It realistically depicts her many mood swings and fights that devolve into yelling. It uses a miraculous combination of both sadness and humor that moved me in unexpected ways. 

I also want to take this opportunity to focus on the incredible actors. Every actor gives their best performance in this movie by making flawless lines sound even better. The star-studded cast includes Kieran Culkin, Matt Damon, Matthew Broderick, Mark Ruffalo, Jeannie Berlin and J. Smith-Cameron. Culkin plays a student who clearly creates himself such a detached persona that his character doesn’t even believe in it himself. Matthew Broderick and Matt Damon play the awkward teachers. Broderick is more passionate about his teaching whereas Damon is significantly more relaxed. Mark Ruffalo portrays a bus driver that tries to use his brain as little as possible even in situations that require it. Jeannie Berlin plays Monica’s friend, an intelligent, bold woman, who gets more and more horrified by Lisa’s world the deeper she gets dragged into it. J. Smith-Cameron plays Lisa’s mother. Her performance is my favorite of them all because she manages to show how much pain and stress her character is hiding while still showing the audience that said pain and stress exists in the first place. She is just a mother trying her best, even though it’s not much at all. 

Kenneth Lonergan, who also directed “Manchester by the Sea” and shares screenwriting credits for “Analyze This” and “Gangs of New York”, began writing the screenplay for “Margaret” in 2003 which was two years after New York City experienced a rather infamous attack. 9/11 is mentioned a few times in the movie which should date it but somehow it just makes the movie all the more relevant. Perhaps it’s the menace that comes from lingering fears and anticipation of new horrors. The movie even mentions the conflicts in Israel and Palestine as a way to show how divided Lisa’s private school truly is. However, throughout all of this, the movie never portrays one character’s opinion as virtuous and another’s as despicable. It merely documents the contrasting attitudes towards the Middle East that existed at the time.

Lonergan, who has a small role in the film as Margaret’s absentee father, has only directed two other movies: “You Can Count on Me” (2000) and “Manchester by the Sea” (2016). All of these movies, including “Margaret”, received a great deal of critical acclaim. However, Lonergan did not start out as a filmmaker. Rather he started out as a playwright. His background in theater comes through in his movies which center around the drama of everyday existence. Kenneth Lonergan’s talent doesn’t end at playwriting, screenwriting, directing and acting. He also is impressively tenacious when it comes to defending his movies. 

Lonergan wrote a 375-page screenplay for “Margaret”. In screenplays a page equals a minute of a movie’s runtime, so obviously this screenplay had to be cut drastically. Lonergan made these cuts efficiently and successfully narrowed the screenplay down to 175 pages. He had promised his producers that he would make a movie under 150 minutes in exchange for final cut privileges which meant that the producers would have to have his approval for an edit of the movie to get released. So, Lonergan decided to shoot his script and just cut down the footage once he got into the editing room. However, once he was actually in the editing room, Lonergan found it tremendously difficult to actually get his movie down to that 150-minute mark. Everything that he tried to cut out from the movie made it significantly worse than its initial three-hour version: “Margaret” clearly was meant to be three hours.

During this time, a producer named Gary Gilbert got fed up and got a different editor to edit his own version with Lonergan’s input. This version of the movie was two hours long. Lonergan hated this version but it was the only version Gilbert wanted. Lonergan finally completed his own version which was about 150 minutes long. Even though he did not feel very good about it, he did have to make a version he liked more to fulfill his contractual obligation while still not using Gilbert’s version. Gilbert continued to want only to release the two-hour version that Lonergan still hated and still had no input in. The two were in complete disagreement. So, Lonergan brought in his friend and collaborator – Martin Scorsese.

To give some context, Lonergan is not and never was that famous. His works usually got critical acclaim but failed to reach broader audiences. Scorsese, on the other hand, is one of the most famous directors living today. If you have somehow not heard of Scorsese, you have probably still seen a movie he produced or directed because his movies are just that famous (some of the movies he directed are Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Good Fellas, The Wolf of Wall Street, Killers of the Flower Moon, Hugo, and Shutter Island). Scorsese is also twenty years older than Lonergan and has always been much more established in the film industry. While Lonergan was editing “Margaret”, the second movie he ever directed, Scorsese was already working on his twenty-eighth (this doesn’t even include the countless movies he has produced). Scorsese loved all of Kenneth Lonergan’s work and more specifically, he saw the three-hour version of “Margaret” and loved it. Scorsese wanted to help Lonergan in any way possible. 

Scorsese offered to create his own third edit of the movie that would also be under 150 minutes as a compromise between Gilbert and Lonergan. Considering that he offered to do this free of charge and would put his name on the movie, the other producers were thrilled. Imagine working on a low-budget indie and a famous filmmaker is willing to edit and put his name on your movie for no additional cost. Scorsese edited his own version and got the movie down to 165 minutes. Lonergan was impressed with this version and agreed that it maintained the integrity of the film much better than his 150-minute version. Still, Gilbert wasn’t satisfied with Scorsese’s version and kept campaigning for his two-hour one. If this sounds insane to you, Mark Ruffalo (an actor in “Margaret”), who noted it was like Gilbert “cut off [his] nose to spite [his] face,” would agree. 

Now there were four versions of Margaret floating around! The 150-minute Lonergan version that all producers except Gilbert were satisfied with, the Scorsese version that Lonergan and the producers other than Gilbert were satisfied with, the two-hour Gilbert version that only Gilbert liked, and the full-length version that  Lonergan was most satisfied with. Gilbert was refusing to go forward with the movie unless it was the one he liked and so plenty of lawsuits and counter-lawsuits followed. The celebrity cast defended the movie throughout.

Eventually in 2011, six years after the movie was shot in 2005, the 150-minute Lonergan version hit a few theaters. Critics and cinephiles fell in love with the movie and petitions spread online for the movie to have a wider release. The petitioners got their wish when the movie was released as a DVD which included two edits. The contractually required edit that was released in the theaters and the three-hour version that Kenneth Lonergan wanted to keep all along. 

I can only recommend the three-hour-long version of this movie. I have not seen the 150-minute version but I know Kenneth Lonergan doesn’t approve of it and that’s enough for me. I believe that the only version of a movie worth watching is the version that the filmmaker intended to make. If a filmmaker doesn’t really like what they made – it shows. I know that three hours is long but this movie does not feel long. I did not notice how much time went by until the movie ended. If you watch the movie and don’t think about its length, I can promise you it will feel like ninety minutes. Time is relative and when you are watching a perfect movie, time feels like it could not move any faster. 

This movie isn’t well-known because it never got the appropriate marketing and its backstory is so complicated that it takes longer to explain which version of the movie somebody should see than it takes to actually just watch another movie instead. If you do yourself the service of seeing this movie, you will realize how truly great it is and hopefully you’ll be just as upset at me at its lack of recognition and about its near-death experience. As I said at the beginning of this article, I don’t know what the person was screaming about outside my window but maybe he was screaming in anguish at the fact that “Margaret” wasn’t properly appreciated during its time. 

Both the three-hour version and the 150-minute version are available to rent on Amazon for 3.99. If you want to see the better, longer version that Martin Scorsese, Kenneth Lonergan and I recommend, search “Margaret Extended Version” on Amazon’s website and only click “rent” if the description says that the movie is three hours and six minutes long. If you choose to do this, I think your time and money will not be wasted. 

Finally, I’ve included the links and titles to the articles below that I used for research purposes. I presented a very summarized version of a long and complicated story. I also presented a biased account of the narrative because I despise Gary Gilbert for what he tried to do to this work of art. Ironically, the drama of Margaret centers around the inefficiencies of bureaucratic institutions. It focuses on the inefficiencies of the school, the law, the police, and the theater. So, it’s fitting that this great work of art nearly slipped through the cracks of another famously bureaucratic institution, the film industry, and thank god it didn’t.  

Here are the links for each article:

Six-Year Legal Battle Over Kenneth Lonergan’s ‘Margaret’ Finally Ends (Exclusive) – The Hollywood Reporter 

Kenneth Lonergan’s Thwarted Masterpiece – The New York Times 

Kenneth Lonergan on Margaret | Film interview The Cinematic Traumas of Kenneth Lonergan | The New Yorker