A bright but callow teenager from a prosperous
Manhattan family is looking for a cowboy hat for her
upcoming dude ranch vacation with her dad. She has no
luck, but she suddenly spots a bus driver wearing the
kind of hat she needs. Hoping to find out where to buy
such a hat, she tries to get the driver's attention as
the bus pulls away, distracting him just enough so
that he runs a red light and hits a pedestrian. The
girl's mental state steadily disintegrates after the
fatal accident, and the rest of the film deals with
her attempts to cope with her feelings and to bring
this chapter of her life to some kind of closure.
This film was lensed in 2005 and was scheduled to be
released in 2007. Some people felt it would be an
Oscar candidate, and no less an industry luminary than
Martin Scorsese declared it a masterpiece.
Unfortunately, it became the subject of bitter
litigation between the producers and the director,
Kenneth Lonergan. Lonergan was contractually required
to create a film with a running time less than 150
minutes, but could not figure out how to do so. He had
been given "final cut," but only if he could comply
with the 150-minute clause. When he failed to produce
a short enough version in a timely manner, the studio
hired other people to take the footage and produce a
marketable movie. Lawsuits and counter-suits followed
(story here), and the film languished in distribution
purgatory.
The film has finally been released on Blu-Ray and DVD
in two versions, one of which fulfills Lonergan's
legal requirements (it weighs in at 149 minutes, 53
seconds), the other of which is the longer version
Lonergan wants us to see. I bought the set, which I
consider a rip-off. The price is very high to begin
with, and I thought (admittedly without reading
carefully) that it included four versions of the film:
Blu-Ray extended, Blu-Ray theatrical, DVD extended,
DVD theatrical. That is not the case. The set includes
a Blu-Ray of the 150-minute cut and a DVD of the
longer version. Period. For me personally, that means
my one goal in buying the set, to get a Blu-Ray of the
longer version, was never achieved.
As it relates to the nudity report, that doesn't
matter. The nudity is exactly the same in both
versions. One of the things we missed because of the
legal wrangling was Anna Paquin's first nude scene.
She was 22 or 23 at the time, and was playing a high
school girl.
The movie itself?
Well, most important, the prolonged legal brouhaha
over this film illustrates why directors should not be
given final cut, especially if they consider
themselves 100% artists and 0% businessmen. Not only
is the 3-hour version unbearably long, but even the
150-minute version could be cut.
Considerably.
During the legal impasse, Lonergan supposedly called
Mark Ruffalo, a confidante and one of the film's
stars, into his editing room and screened the film for
him. As the story goes, he asked "What could I
possibly cut?", and Ruffalo supposedly could find
nothing to trim from the work of perfect genius. I'm
not sure exactly how Mark drew that conclusion, and I
don't even know whether the meeting really happened,
but I'll tell you this: the film should be cut a lot
more, and many places where it could be trimmed are
extremely obvious, even if no individual scenes are
excised from the movie. At various times in the film,
people walk down aisles and corridors in real time.
Elsewhere, people watch an opera and we see an ungodly
amount of the actual opera-within-the-film. If an
editor did nothing more than trim all that sort of
fat, another 20 minutes could be lopped off.
But that's just the tip of the iceberg. If Lonergan
were to give the footage to me and let me do what I
wanted with it, I would eliminate or shorten many
tangential scenes or scenes of peripheral importance,
and would probably trim the film down to about 90
minutes. That would not only make it a properly paced
film, ("proper" only in my opinion of course), but
would also increase the relative significance of the
scenes which are truly important and powerful. Perhaps
just as important, if such a trim had been made six
years ago, the result might have been a limited
theatrical run in commercial theaters in 2006 or 2007.
Had that been the case, the people involved in the
film would have benefited financially in two ways: (1)
the film would have grossed a few bucks, especially if
it could have cooked up some Oscar buzz, stimulated by
Scorsese's admiration; (2) everyone involved in the
litigation could have kept all the money they paid to
lawyers when they were suing each other.
"Would this be a great film at 90-100 minutes?", you
wonder.
You know what? It just might be. If Lonergan were to
give the film to somebody like Paul Greengrass and his
great editor Christopher Rouse, who together managed
to turn the awful script for The Bourne Ultimatum into
a very watchable and commercially viable movie, this
film might realistically have been an Oscar candidate.
It has a solid premise, an excellent cast, weighty
ideas, and some very powerful scenes. Atom Egoyan once
got nominated for a "best director" Oscar for a film
with a similar premise (The Sweet Hereafter). I don't
know if there is a money-making film to be assembled
from any possible combination of Margaret footage.
Probably not. But that's not the point. There has to
be a great artistic achievement in there somewhere.
But Lonergan couldn't find it
