Madeline
This is another movie that came across my lap due to Movie Crush. This is the dramatic and tough to watch coming of age story of a girl in a tailspin. This movie is about a girl with dramatic but understandable downfall. It’s a girl who is trying to cope with tragedy. And her choice of coping is not helpful to her situation.
Margaret: The Tailspin of a Girl
In Margaret, New York City, private high school student Lisa Cohen witnesses a bus accident resulting in death. Not only did she witness it, she had contact with the bus driver previous, saw a possible reason to fault the bus driver. Before the woman dies, Lisa is holding her head in her lap and comforting her.
This would be a tough situation for anyone, but for a girl who is still trying to figure out who she is, this is particularly difficult. While deciding to come clean about what exactly she witnessed to the police and what to do next, she is also experimenting with sex and drugs. and throw a rocky relationship with her divorced parents for the cherry on top. The whole story is a lot to chew on.
Where The Movie Name, Margaret, Comes From
The movie is named after a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins entitled “Spring and Fall.” It’s about a girl who goes through changes with the seasons with great difficulty. This change is a lot of heartache and tough times, and through the movie Margret, that is exactly what Lisa is going through. She is a girl in a tailspin who is not correcting the flight. She changing with the seasons and going into winter quickly.
The poem is brought into the movie by being read by Lisa’s English teacher played by Matthew Broderick. Although the movie could have stood apart from the poem, the film makers made the naming of this movie very clear by adding this brief scene. Someone who is not aware of the poem nor the movie title roots, will have a full “oh, now I get it moment” during this scene. I picture all viewers listening very intently to this scene.
Lisa’s Drama
Lisa is a typical teenage girl. But add on a life of privilege, being treated much like an adult, with divorced parents and, most of all, a trama. She does drugs in a party bathroom, loses her virginity to a friend she knows doesn’t care about her, and seduces and has sex with her teacher all within a short span of a movie. In the end, she ends up pregnant with a possibility of three fathers and her response is nonchalance.
New York’s Cameo
New York is very much a main character in this movie. It is shown without adding much to the context of the movie. What it adds though is how important the setting of this movie is. This movie would not work the same if it took place in Nebraska or Florida. New York has a complexity about it that causes children to grow faster than what was intended.
My Final Thoughts
This is not a movie for a light hearted evening. Although Lisa puts off a lightheartedness about her, there is nothing about her that is light. She is carrying a lot of burden and doesn’t know how to deal with it. And her way of dealing with it is to shrug it all off. And this shrugging off just makes it worse. This is a movie about a girl in a tailspin. There is nothing light about this movie.
