You haven’t really seen the brilliant Margaret unless you’ve seen the extended cut
Film Features Margaret
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: With the fabled Snyder Cut improbably making its way to HBO Max this week, we’re looking back on other significant directors’ cuts.
Margaret “extended cut” (2011)
“No good movie is too long,” Roger Ebert wrote long ago, “and no bad movie is short enough.” It’s definitely possible for a good movie to be too short, however. Case in point: the theatrically released cut of Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan’s long-awaited—and long-delayed—sophomore feature. Contractually obligated to deliver a movie running no more than two and a half hours, Lonergan spent some five years in the editing room (on and off) struggling to hit that arbitrary mark without debilitating his baby; the version that finally arrived in theaters runs precisely two hours, 29 minutes, and 53 seconds. It’s a masterful job, in hindsight, managing to preserve the contours of the wildly ambitious project that Lonergan had in mind. But Margaret was expressly designed as an unprecedented sort of epic, and only the three-hour “extended cut” (included as a bonus disc with the Blu-ray, albeit in standard definition) realizes its full potential.
In theory, it’d be possible to edit a version of the film with a standard runtime, focusing on its ostensible plot: A teenage girl named Lisa (Anna Paquin) distracts a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), causing him to run a red light and kill a pedestrian (Allison Janney, in a brief but wrenching turn). Lisa initially lies to the police to protect the driver, but guilt at her own responsibility for the accident eventually drives her to set in motion a lawsuit designed to get the guy fired. That’s the synopsis of a potentially fine drama, but it’s not the movie that Lonergan wanted to make. Margaret (which features no character of that name; the title comes from a Gerard Manley Hopkins poem) seeks to examine the full scope of Lisa’s life during this traumatic period: her turbulent relationship with her mother (future Succession star J. Smith-Cameron), her awkward first sexual experience (with future Succession star Kieran Culkin), her classes at a tony New York prep school, and so forth. Virtually every plot-driven movie ever made ignores what its protagonist does during lulls in the action; Margaret lives in those lulls, constantly reminding you that a whole teeming, messy world is happening, not just to this young woman but to every single person around her.
There’s just enough of this element in the theatrical version to get the idea across, but too little to prevent the film’s deliberate digressions from coming across to many as weirdly irrelevant. In the extended cut, there’s no mistaking what Lonergan is up to. One restored scene early on spends several minutes slowly pushing toward Lisa and a guy she’s dumping (John Gallagher Jr.) as they talk in a diner’s corner booth; for a while, we hear not them but the conversations of others around them, featuring mini-dramas that are every bit as important to these anonymous extras as Lisa’s effort to deflect the guy’s romantic ardor is to her. In the theatrical version, Lisa seduces her math teacher (Matt Damon), then, in a moment of emotional stress, accosts him and a woman (either his girlfriend or another teacher) on the street and tells them, out of nowhere, that she had an abortion. This seems to be a lie meant to hurt him, but the extended cut reveals that it isn’t, and better explains why Damon is in the movie at all.
Most crucially, the extended cut forgets about the bus accident for a good long while (with pointed reminders here and there), making it much clearer that the movie isn’t really about that, even though Lisa’s lawsuit takes up much of its second half. (By that point, an entire 90-minute feature has already elapsed.) Admittedly, there are downsides to watching this version, which was never properly finished and both looks and sounds comparatively rough. Lonergan had thought about using classical and operatic music throughout, rather than the original score he wound up commissioning from Nico Muhly, and he incorporates that approach here in a way that doesn’t quite work; the final opera scene, in particular, has more power when it’s not immediately preceded by a stirring passage from Wagner’s Lohengrin (which is not the opera they’ll be watching on screen). Still, those minor infelicities are outweighed by the opportunity to experience Margaret as it was truly and boldly meant to be.
Availability: The extended cut of Margaret is currently streaming on HBO Max, though it’s hidden in the “Extras” link. Otherwise you’ll get the theatrical version.
31 Comments
My pick for the best film of last decade, easy. Lonergan makes the most devastatingly humane movies around, and there are more moments in this one that just get past all my defences in no time through sheer raw feeling than there are across plenty of classics put together.
Margaret is such a masterpiece. Every element is a masterclass. The performances, the flow, the look of it, the rhythm, the sound. Everything. It’s not a flashy film; but every moment is compelling and wrenching. No one fills in the blanks of human life on screen better than Kenneth Lonergan.
This movie completely flew under my radar. I can’t wait to check it out.
I’m about halfway through, and I’m blown away, so far
I was iffy on this until I found out they added back in the plotline where Anna Paquin’s character, Lisa “Rogue” Cohen, steals people’s powers when she touches them.
I thought the scenes of her dating a vampire were kind of unnecessary.
I was really confused by the idea that Anna Paquin was playing a teenager in 2011. But the whole “6 years in post-production” thing makes a lot more sense.
That’s like 96 geese in Fly Away Home years.
The article image looks exactly like every expression Sookie ever used in True Blood.
Though I wholeheartedly agree that the extended cut is the better movie, I never thought Margaret as a masterpiece.It’s tough when Lonergan already made one of those earlier in his career: You Can Count on Me.
I love You Can Count on Me (first thing I ever saw Ruffalo in), and I agree that the narrative strategies of both films are similar, but I think the dramatic focus of Margaret is sufficiently different to warrant repeated screenings of both.The first film is really about negotiating adult relationships when siblings have weathered profound loss. Margaret, on the other hand, is decidedly a coming-of-age film and reminds us how tumultuous being on the verge of womanhood is.Of course all three of Lonergan’s films focus on a confrontation with death/mortality (and how Lee/Affleck, Lisa/Paquin, Sammy/Linney negotiate family/relationships post-tragedy), but Margaret explores the vicissitudes of impending womanhood in a very specific fashion. It’s one of the most complex and sympathetic representations of teen girlhood I’ve ever viewed.
Yes, this movie really isn’t great. Good performances tho.
Margaret is playing on Disney plus (original cinema release)
I’m guessing you’re outside the US, as D+ out there has added more adult fare for countries without Disney-majority-0wned Hulu under the Star label, whereas our Yankee D+ is relatively-family-friendly and has no such tab. That said, for the Muricans, Margaret is currently available on HBO Max, though not sure which version.
HBO Max only has the theatrical cut (2 hours 29 minutes), not this extended 3-hour version. As a big fan of the film, thankfully I still have the Blu-ray that has the extended cut (well actually, the extended version is on a separate DVD). It’s definitely the way to see this film.
Look under the “extras” section after you go to the movie. The extended version is there
Oh yeah, you’re right! I guess I wasn’t looking closely enough.
I got such culture shock reading this comment
yeah, outside the US. Forgot about international rights etc. did read the HBO MAX screening is the new 3hr ext. version.
The Extended Cut is available as a Made-On-Demand DVD. Running time 3hr, 7min. It’s the only version I’ve seen and it held my interest throughout so ol’ Rog was right about no good movie being too long.
I’m going to disagree with Rog. A movie should be viewable in one sitting. Otherwise, use a different medium (like a miniseries).
I think there’s a good number of three hour-plus movies that can be watched in one sitting and never needing to check your watch if they are worth its salt. In fact, I spent a decent part of my day today, a rare one without work, watching such a movie (ok, Im cheating just a little in that it’s just shy of 180 minutes, but still!).
I was actually thinking of things like how “OJ: Made in America” competed as both a movie & miniseries when (in my view) it’s clearly works as the latter but not the former. More recently, we have Small Axe. That’s either a miniseries or a series of movies. Watching it all in one sitting as a feature would be too much. And now Zack Snyder’s Justice League is something that would have never gotten a theatrical release without enormous cuts to the running time. Who wants to sit for that long?
I was just thinking of all the three-hour movies I’ve sat through in the theater and none of them were a problem: Titanic, Magnolia, Short Cuts, The Green Mile, JFK, Dances with Wolves, The Last Emperor… probably more.
If you’re unwilling or unable to focus on something for three hours, that’s your problem, not the movie’s.
So it’s really not the problem of “The Longest Most Meaningless Movie in the World” that people wouldn’t want to sit there watching it for two days straight?
Bruce Banner and Rogue met before they got gamma rayed and had a brief romance / bus accident. Oof, I’m going to need to see this (didn’t even know the movie existed until now) and find out exactly what brilliant is.
I’ve only seen the Directors Cuts of this & Kingdom of Heaven. In both cases I don’t really see the appeal. My view on the Snyder cut is similar to them: at least some people get to enjoy it, even if those people aren’t me.
I can’t recommend this movie enough, and I heard about it first on the AV Club. Thanks AV Club! It’s baffling how hard it is to find this within the HBO menu.
I have only seen the long version. Thought it was close to being a masterpiece. Of the Lonergan movies I have seen it is the one that has stuck with me the most.
On today’s edition of White People Blogging About Really White Stuff…