merylmatt
I made two mistakes - selecting this movie to watch and getting the extended cut, which adds an additional 30 minutes to this already too long movie. This is a movie that should be shown to all aspiring script writers - as an example of what not to do. The average script is 100-120 minutes making a movie about 90-110 minutes long. Perhaps with a revised, tighter script, this could have been something. Taking away the background dialog in many of the scenes would be helpful. We get it that in NYC, it's loud, there are always noises surrounding you. The movie does not suffer from a lack of talent, Matt Damon, Mark Ruffo, Allison Janney, Jean Reno to name a few, it's just their skills are wasted in this movie that drags on and on and on and on and on and on - oh, I should write a shorter review? Good idea. This movie is too long and squanders the talent of its stars. It needs more plot, a clearly defined conflict and resolution. 2 stars for the acting skills cleverly hidden in this movie.
tedg
Okay, I've been through both edits of this now, after recommendations from several readers. I get what he is trying to do. I am writing as someone who prefers the Cannes edit of Brown bunny and who eagerly sat through 3 1/2 hours of The Falls.I think this is a failure, a failure is the sense that the filmmaker had ambitions that may have been unachievable. What he wanted, I think is to have two films merged. One that carried a narrative that mattered and conveyed transformation. And another that conveyed situation, and not just surroundings but an environment that collectively has agency of the same power. You have to see both edits to see this man's struggle; you can compress the first of these because we have all sorts of narrative enzymes in our digestive system. We can fill in things and often are better off with less.It is also the case that you can make an environmental movie with scant narrative. Greenaway does it all the time. Ruiz. Kar-Wai Wong. And if you are willing to have a smaller, more engaged audience, this is achievable in 150 minutes. What Lonergan wanted to do was to have both and have each drive the other. Moreover, he placed himself and his wife as the contacts, a dual fulcrum between the two.There are so many dynamics that are necessary to bind this, to make all the parts affect each other the way he designed that taking any one out ruins the structure. If you did not know his ambition, a viewer would hardly see anything wrong. The Paquin character is great, as are the surrounding actors. The city, the tone, the environment is as richly presented as the best Woody Allen Manhattan-anchored movie. But the environment does not have the coherent agency it needs to do what he clearly intended.I think we have to have a much longer version than 3 hours to accomplish what he attempted. But gosh, the ambition is admirable and all the pieces I can see are amazingly promising. It is no wonder that first rate talent was eager to participate.
tieman64
This is a review of "You Can Count On Me" and "Margaret", two excellent films written and directed by playwright Kenneth Lonergan.Released in 2000, "You Can Count On Me" stars Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo as Sammy and Terry, two siblings whose lives have been affected by a family tragedy. Sammy lives alone with her son Rudy (Rory Culkin), whilst Terry's a drifter who lives on the road. When Terry moves in with the duo, he begins to form a bond with Sammy's kid. Sounds formulaic? It's not. Lonergan dodges clichés like crazy, conveys a certain emotional complexity, and delights in subtly setting up and then overturning expectations. In this regard, Terry is initially portrayed as a delinquent with no gifts, responsibilities or direction. Sammy, meanwhile, is portrayed as a strong, steadfast, stable Mom who has life by the reigns. Cleverly, however, Lonergan questions these narrow assumptions. Terry begins to reveal himself as a perceptive guy, becomes a surrogate father to young Rudy and reveals various talents. Sammy, meanwhile, unravels before our eyes. Both Ruffalo and Linney turn in excellent work. Ruffalo consciously mimics a young Brando, but is more wounded, more inwardly tortured. Like most of Ruffalo's characters, his Terry is a quiet, sexily melancholic guy. Linney, meanwhile, paints Sammy as a bristly, tightly wound woman. Both characters engage in rituals of denial, burying their pain, engaging in flights of fancy and never discussing "things" directly.More ambitious than "You Can Count On Me" is Lonergan's "Margaret", a deliberately lurid melodrama. The film stars Anna Paquin as Lisa, a precocious teenager who lives a life of privilege in New York City. When Lisa distracts a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo), this leads to a traffic accident and the death of a young woman. From here on, Lisa attempts to get the bus driver incarcerated, pursuing an idea of justice that's designed to expiate her guilt, though unconsciously she desires to draw attention to her own crimes. The film abounds with complex little moments. Lisa appears like a rude idiot in some of her school classes, but like a passionate, intelligent girl in others. She appears sexually mature and confident in some sequences, but hopelessly inexperienced in others. A mercurial force, Lisa purses everything with a sense of vengeance, though her roiling, emerging sense of self is also frequently humbled, as she spends much of the film dealing with her own insecurities, limitations and nagging conscience. Lonergan thus manages a strange juggling act; Lisa the hurricane, Lisa the mouse. He then applies these wild polar shifts to other characters. One kid, for example, played by Kieran Culkin, seems cool as a cucumber, until we learn he's sexually incompetent. School teachers (Matt Damon) and various other adult characters are given similar treatments.Elsewhere the film centres on Lisa's beleaguered single mother, a successful stage actress. Lisa attacks her mother for attending "boring Opera productions", in which "stupid people just want to prove how loud they can sing", without realising that she herself embraces an operatic vision of life. For Lisa, Lisa is the centre of the universe, Lisa's dilemmas matter, Lisa's trapped in a grandiose web. Lonergan thus has Lisa's daily troubles and emotional catharses – indeed, the whole aesthetic of his film - echo the operatic form. He then mirrors Lisa's operatic self-centredness with the quieter, more mature world-views of older characters. Reserved, bottled-up and more generous than Lisa, these are characters who have learnt what every teenager eventually learns: you are not the centre of the universe. Other people matter. But Lonergan also sympathises with Lisa. Her private operas also matter. From these contradictions then spring various exchanges about anti-Semitism and so forth. In "Margaret", everyone has their own opera, they just approach the sound-stage with different levels of jadedness.Incidentally, the film's title refers to the person addressed in Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem, "Spring and Fall". That poem was about a girl called Margaret who is shocked to realise that all the beautiful trees around her are experiencing a form of death and decay. As Margaret's innocence crumbles, the poem then mocks her for mourning leaves whilst being ignorant to the plights of human beings. It then argues that as she grows older, Margaret's understanding will grow, until she'll be able to see the death of leaves and things in "other worlds" as well.The poem thus concisely embodies Lonergan themes: how rational minds are prone to irrationality, how emotional storms are both warranted and supremely narcissistic, how moral behaviour is oft made difficult, how private traumas and complications routinely go unnoticed by others, how everyone engages in fantasy projection, how indifference functions as both a kind of maturity and cold-heartedness, how being good and wishing to be seen "being good" differ, how morality is necessary but seems limited and trite in the face of greater injustices, how suffering seems relative, the difference between intellectually knowing and physically experiencing, the imperfections of people and the world itself etc etc.Aesthetically, "You Can Count On Me" is the more conventional of the two films. "Margaret", meanwhile, is shot with a certain Olympian grandeur, everything big and bombastic, Lonegan's stance magisterial and overcooked by design. The film had a troubled post-production history, spending five years in editing rooms, civil courts and without release. When it finally hit cinema screens, nearly half a decade after it was shot, it was hailed as a masterpiece by several directors, most notably Martin Scorsese. Several cuts of the film exist. Lonergan's preferred cut is roughly three hours long.8.9/10 – See "Everything Must Go", "Ghost World", "The Yellow Hankerchief" and "Frozen River". Worth two viewings.
