The movie is Margaret, the six-years-on-the-shelf post-9/11 drama, and it is the type of thing you rarely see. It has a solid cast, a dramatic setting and a powerhouse opening. All the tracks are laid for a big emotional movie with recognizable beats and teary-eyes speechifying. But something kinda magical happens. It is as if writer/director Kenneth Lonergan stood up, said “No!” and demanded that the chaos and heartache that challenges us in real life must challenge us as audience members, too. As such, the story chugs along following its own internal logic, chasing tangents and getting hyper-focused on vignettes that seem, at least on the surface, to be completely unrelated to anything.
[Continue reading at Badass Digest.]
