When Mr. Beaks really likes something, I pay attention. He really liked the script for Margaret, Kenneth Lonergan’s insanely long awaited follow up to You Can Count on Me (has it really been five years since that film threatened to make a star out of Mark Ruffalo? It really feels like that guy is treading water), so that means I’m looking forward to the film.
That gets much easier as casting news begins to come out. It’s already been announced that Anna Paquin will star – now Variety is reporting that she might be acting alongside Matt Damon and – hey! – Mark Ruffalo.
I really dig Matt Damon more and more. The Brothers Grimm may not be a terribly good movie, but it’s not his fault, and I remain constantly impressed by the roles the guy takes. As Ari put it on Entourage last week, “Who do you want to be – Damon or Affleck?”
The film reads strongly as a post-9/11 allegory, Beaks said in his script review, where he attempted to summarize a plot not meant to be summarized: "The screenplay hinges on a single tragedy: a bus accident that claims the life of a middle-aged woman. Her death is, in part, the inadvertent result of a bit of innocent flirting between the bus’s driver and a seventeen year-old girl named Lisa Cohen, the tale’s protagonist. Lisa, like many girls her age, is an awkward piece of work, managing the transition to womanhood with the requisite violent mood swings and wild carnal yearnings that make parents wish they’d thought twice about the whole child rearing thing. She’s nurturing two verboten crushes – one on the spoken-for school stud Paul and the other on her handsome math teacher – carelessly breaking the heart of one who loves her – an angsty sad sack named Darren – and driving her divorced mother, Joan, crazy with self-absorbed antics. The accident, written vividly on the page so as to suggest Lonergan plans to shoot an unflinchingly bloody spectacle, amplifies all of these emotions, and emboldens her with a misplaced sense of purpose that threatens to destroy the lives of all those unlucky enough to be pulled into her orbit."
Sounds fascinating, and the rest of that script review (which you can read here) definitely fills me with some serious excitement about this project.