Director: Kenneth Lonergan
Year Released: 2011
Rating: 3.0
A privileged (and defiant) 17-year-old (Anna Paquin) distracts a bus-driver (Mark Ruffalo), who proceeds to run the light and hit a woman crossing (Allison Janney); at first, she says it was an accident, but then she changes her mind and turns 'getting' the bus-driver fired into her own personal vendetta. Even in this chopped-up form (running 150 minutes) - from Lonergan's intended three-hour cut - this is a stunning morality play and character study, essentially about the processes a jaded, bratty, difficult young woman must undergo to realize the world does not revolve around her, that people aren't to be used like pawns (to achieve one's own delusional ends) and that sometimes accidents just happen: when she finally breaks down in tears at the opera, it's the movie's (hopeful) way of suggesting she just grew up a little bit. There's a lot going on beneath the surface, and though the last third of the movie is a jumble - trimmed down and edited to oblivion - it doesn't destroy Lonergan's meditation on how people just don't relate to each other and how even basic communication can be a struggle. In fact, if there's something Lonergan can be faulted for is trying to say too much in such a condensed period of time: this could very well have gone four hours. Paquin is grating and obnoxious, but she's supposed to be; the only thing I couldn't grasp is why more people didn't tell her to shut the hell up more often.
