From HitFix:
As the door closes on phase one of the Oscar season and nomination ballots are finalized, Kenneth Lonergan’s “Margaret” takes the stage in the final moments. Screeners of the film were finally sent out to all voting members of the Academy recently, and now, supporters of the film wait to see if said members may have responded to the material.

The actress at the center of the story, Anna Paquin, delivered her performance six years ago, when she was 23. And yet the experience still seems fresh and vivid in her mind, as if she were leaving the set after a day of emotional Olympics on “Margaret” rather than an evening of stunt-heavy work on Alan Ball’s southern-fried vamp camp phenomenon “True Blood.”

What the intermittent years have done is give her a sense of perspective akin to the kind of enriched self-understanding only attained with the passage of time. But then the actress already had the benefit of chronological distance from her character, Lisa Cohen, when production began, providing the space necessary for her to find what was lovable in a girl who she concedes is so often eristic in the film.

“When you’re a little bit older than the character that you’re playing, it’s easier to be compassionate towards their less likable qualities,” she says. “She’s gone through this horrible trauma and she takes it out on everyone around her in that way that people do. And she’s trying to make sense of what’s happened to her. And, of course, she’s only 17.”

In her innocent, yet rigidly determined quest to find a cowboy hat for a trip to New Mexico that will take her outside of her isolated Upper West Side of Manhattan life, Lisa distracts a bus driver long enough for him to hit and kill a woman. The scene, so beautifully, wrenchingly realized, shocks the audience within the first 10 minutes of the film. The remaining 140 minutes depicts Lisa’s reconciliation with the girl she was before she felt the life leave a woman she helped to kill and her journey toward accepting a world filled with senseless atrocity.

“It’s about the pain of having to realize that the world around her is not perfect, and that’s kind of okay,” Paquin says. “She’s trying to do the right thing, and do the right thing, and do the right thing and it doesn’t get her anywhere. Eventually she has to, not give up, but let go of the idea that there’s a good outcome if everyone just sort of behaves by a predetermined moral code. Because that is ultimately a very naïve, young point of view. It’s the passage of childhood into adulthood.”
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