“MARGARET” — A HAMMER TO NAIL REVIEW

By Michael Tully

(Without any fanfare, Margaret was released theatrically by Fox Searchlight on Friday, September 30, 2011. Visit the film’s official website to learn more.)

Oh boy. Oh wow. If your idea of a rewarding time at the movies is a symphonic drama that aches with the blood, sweat and tears of real life while simultaneously upholding the finest traditions of opera, of theater, of poetry, of literature, look no further than Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret. Much has been written about the unfortunate legal brouhaha surrounding the film’s post-production — it was shot in 2005 while here we are twiddling our thumbs in late 2011 — and though no one seems able to definitively say whose cut of the film this 149-minute theatrical version is (for what it’s worth, the film print has a 2008 copyright), that honestly doesn’t matter. Margaret is superior cinema any way you look at it.

Lonergan kicks off his dramatic opus with an opening credits sequence that paints New York City in a somberly triumphant light: in super slow-motion, everyday New Yorkers make their way to wherever it is they are going — work, school, brunch, home — as composer Nico Muhly’s rueful theme rises. These images are captured with a grainy, bleached out beauty by cinematographer Ryszard Lenczewski, a textured, lived-in look that Lonergan and Lenczewski carry throughout the film.

The story is centered around Anna Paquin’s Lisa, an Upper West Side teenager whose life is privileged, though far from perfect. An idealistic, hypersensitive girl who is coming to terms with her budding sexual power, Lisa can’t seem to have a conversation with her mother Joan (J. Smith-Cameron) — an especially busy Off Broadway actress — without getting into an argument. After school one day — a private school she attends on a half-scholarship — Lisa accidentally plays a role in a freak bus accident that takes a woman’s life (this scene is played out in what feels like real time and nails the strange blend of horror, drama, and humor that is specific to tragedies such as these). In a moment of perceived … Read the rest

SODERBERGH ON STORYTELLING AND EARLY RETIREMENT

By Scott Macaulay

In an interview with the L.A. Times, Matt Damon, currently shooting Contagion with Steven Soderbergh, says the director is seriously considering retiring from the film business within a couple of years. For anyone who watched the director’s world-weary interview in the extras to the Criterion Che set, this might not come as a surprise. Around the same time, he told Esquire that he wanted to retire by 51. In the L.A. Times piece, Damon elaborates on Soderbergh’s thinking with quotes that also provide a nice corrective to the indie-film bromide that “it’s all about the story.” For many of our best filmmakers, that’s simply not true:

“He’s retiring, he’s been talking about it for years and it’s getting closer,” Damon said of Soderbergh, whose credits include Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s Eleven, The Informant and Sex, Lies and Videotape. Soderbergh turns 48 next month, and if that sounds young, that’s the point, Damon said.

“He wants to paint and he says he’s still young enough to have another career,” Damon said. “He’s kind of exhausted with everything that interested him in terms of form. He’s not interested in telling stories. Cinema interested him in terms of form and that’s it. He says, ‘If I see another over-the-shoulder shot, I’m going to blow my brains out.’….

“After I worked with Clint [Eastwood] I went back and said, ‘Look, Clint is having a blast and he’s going to be 80 years old.’ And Steven says back, ‘Yeah, but he’s a storyteller and I’m not,’” Damon recounted. “If you’re an actor or a writer or someone working in film, it’s such a waste. For me, I’m going to spend the next 40 years trying to become a great director and I will never reach what he’s reached. And he’s walking away from it.”

… Read the rest

FINCHER, EASTWOOD, DAMON, ASSAYAS AND DANTE FOR DOWNLOAD

By Scott Macaulay

Jamie Stuart has made available the complete video interviews excerpted for his short film NYFF 48, which we premiered here at Filmmaker. (If you haven’t watched Jamie’s Kubrick and Bruce Connor-inspired piece of apocalyptic film journalism, please turn up the speakers, turn down the lights, and click here.) After viewing then check out the full interviews by clicking over to Jamie’s site.

Here’s Olivier Assayas (pictured).

David Fincher.

Clint Eastwood and Matt Damon.

Joe Dante.… Read the rest

THOUGHTS ON PAUL GREENGRASS’S “GREEN ZONE” |
By Scott Macaulay

The genius of the Jason Bourne movies is their welding of existentialist inquiry with the demands of the thriller in a globalist age. Adapted from Robert Ludlum’s series, Doug Liman and screenwriters Tony Gilroy and W. Blake Herron established the template with The Bourne Identity, locating their film’s MacGuffin not in the outside world but under the skin of its hero. As ex-intelligence operative Jason Bourne skips from city to city, pursuing clue after clue, he is ultimately investigating not a case but his own identity. What kind of man was — is — he?

For my money, the first Bourne movie is the best (maybe just because it’s the first, and the fresh concept is so satisfying), but Paul Greengrass’s agitated camerawork and sophisticated editing made the next two more than sequels. As a director, Greengrass organizes physical space with the relentlessness of a search engine, mirroring the panoptical information state that exists around us. Of course, by doing so he accentuates the films’ central irony: in a world in which everyone can be tracked, followed, and indexed, Bourne searches for a kind of gnosis that can not be physically represented. He thus becomes a fascinating filmic protagonist. Is he a hero or a villain? We — and he — don’t know.

Less concerned with character and identity, Greengrass’s recent non-Bourne films are more broadly epistemological in their concerns. United 93 fixes on screen what remains unknowable as well as debatable — what really happened on board the downed flight on September 11. By reconstructing these events within a Hollywood picture, Greengrass implicitly poses questions about the relationship of politics and ideology to history. These issues are tackled again, head-on, in his latest, The Green Zone, in theaters now. Matt Damon is now Miller, a U.S. Army officer showing no traces of Jason Bourne’s inner conflicts. Commandeering missions to unearth weapons of mass destruction at sites identified by “human intelligence,” Miller comes to believe, first, that these leads are faulty and then, finally, fictitious. The camera jitters and the score pounds as Miller searches for “the … Read the rest