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Desperately seeking adult role models (spoilers)


I've read people commenting here with confusion or discontent at the film's attention given to either Lisa's relationship with her mom or why the subplot with Joan and Ramon - or with her teachers and wondering why Lonergan even has two different teachers (Damon and Broderick) with semi-developed roles in the film ...

I think these observations or objections miss a key theme that I see in the film (as a unique study on the loss of innocence as transition point into adulthood).

One of our first awarenesses of Joan's role in Lisa's life comes as we hear her encourage Lisa to lie to the police about what she witnessed. Joan offers a rationale - that it would perhaps needlessly risk the bus driver's livelihood and family - and the Lisa we see at the outset buys into that stance almost on auto-pilot, while we see that she is already feeling something very powerful is awry if this is what is expected of her (to hide a truth) in the face of this trauma that has shaken her world. Her discomfort makes her start looking intensely for guidance from the adults around her, starting even with the bus driver himself at the scene of the accident as she looks rather desperately at him during the initial police interview, looking for some sign in his face as to whether she should protect him or not. She has a piece of truth about what happened that gives her a sudden unsought and unexpected power that she has no real idea how to use - either sharing or hiding that truth, she will be determining outcomes both for her own self-respect and sense of fairness and rightness in the world and also for the impact her truth will have on other's lives, initially just that of the bus driver but eventually on the lives of the best friend and cousin of the deceased, in diverse ways. As we see, when that almost-desperate quest leads her to track him down, he turns out, like most of the adults in her sphere of influence, to not be very responsible or circumspect or even honest with themselves about what motivates them. That realization decides the matter for her, as she increasingly wakens to a kind of cognitive dissonance - seeing that her hidden truth about the accident is allowing an adult to forego his own self-honesty or sense of responsibility.

Among the litany of adults she seeks out in the course of the film, one teacher (Damon) becomes the first other adult (besides her mom) with whom she shares and sounds out her dilemma. She is searching for other potential modelings of how an adult should handle such a moral-compass situation - but as she eventually 'tests' Damon, he proves himself to be as inadequate a role model in his own way as the bus driver who is blind to himself or her mother who encourages her to lie. Yes, she seduced him, but at a perhaps unconscious level, I think she was hoping and needing him to prove to be an adult with boundaries and honesty about what his role as an adult needed to be.

Broderick represents another exemplar of an adult in denial, not honest with himself even about whether he really seeks open discussion among his students when it turns out he cannot handle open debate of interpretations of literature's meanings. She seeks from afar to test whether her father holds an answer for her but he too turns out to be a bit fraudulent in his overtures of caring and prioritizing family - and she hears by phone how he seems to be in his own denial about the life and relationships he has opted for in having separated from her mother.

No one quite seems to get what she sees and struggles with as to what matters in regards her own truthtelling. So, lacking that, she ultimately trusts the gnawing instinct in her that makes her change her police report - after first giving Ruffalo as bus driver a chance to 'prove himself' as a self-aware adult but he fails the test in his own self-serving denial about what his own responsibility was. Then the best friend of the deceased, who she initially leans toward as an ally in truth-seeking, turns out as well to have her own erraticnesses that lead her to see there was only really a surface alliance albeit a crucial one that helped her search for how to put her inner moral-compass instincts into play. The deceased's cousins - as well as the lawyer who seeks to rationalize their pov - appal her with their respective myopic, hypocritical, and/or self-serving stances.

Everywhere she turns - and imho the point is made only by Lonergan having her turn to so many different adults in her life or to study them as to their role-model potential - she eventually sees that she has to figure this out ultimately on her own. And when she does, somewhat surprisingly, it is her mother who voices respect and alliance in the choice Lisa makes to tell a truth her mother had initially advised her against. It is her mother who winds up being able to engage open debate, so to speak, on a truly complex moral dilemma (whereas Broderick as her teacher couldn't countenance any challenge to his stance on even a literary interpretation). Meanwhile, the relationship her mother has developed with Ramon, a relationship we see Joan herself seeming somewhat ambivalent about, not enthralled by in a way that an adolescent in particular would expect or idealize as the way a romance would/should look, becomes yet another adult modeling of 'how to be' as she studies her mother's own 'investment' in this relationship. And until Ramon's sudden death, she mostly seems to draw from her observations of her mother vis-a-vis Ramon a further basis for feeling alienated from her mom. But then she - and Joan herself - discover how much Joan has grown to care about Ramon in the face of losing him. And, significantly, he has brought opera first into Joan's life and then into Lisa's - an art that highlights adult struggles with trauma and tragedy, singing out in grief and desperation and searching for their own way to honor their emotions (the world's great operas transmitting this emotional message in a way that hits Lisa as it hits many, without needing to actually know the language being sung).

As I see it, the film culminates in this operatic climactic moment with Lisa suddenly 'getting it' that the very quest she has been so confounded by - seeking to responsibly deal with the role she played in a tragic death, seeking in other words to assume an adult-like responsibility she's suddenly been thrust in - no longer able to be the 'innocent' who has no such responsibilities - and where her quest for role models has mostly fallen short - that very quest is at the heart of the struggle of adulthood, sung of in operas and, it turns out, something she can see as a potential bond with her mother, who suddenly emerges as the one person she can feel safe and connected with enough to unleash the grief that this rite of passage has stirred in her, quite profoundly.

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Excellent analysis! Thanks for taking the time to write this up.

I agree with everything you said, and I think you say it very well. But I might take the film's criticism one step further. While I think what you say is true, that the film is critiquing the adult characters, judging them, in a sense, for their value as "role models," as you put it, I think there's an implied deeper level here.

If the film portrays adults as essentially self-serving agents who are unable or unwilling to "do the right thing" when put to the test in a variety of situations, what exactly does this say about society as a whole? Why is it that the people who are supposed to be the most responsible and wise are so blinded by personal interest, so unable to see the truth or be honest with themselves, and rise to the moral challenge? Could it be, perhaps, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the kind of society we live in? Something about the dominant ideology of society that causes that blindness and leads to moral failure?

It's a subtle critique, to be sure, but Lonergan does seem to have intentionally given the film a context that implies a larger significance, beyond the sphere of the characters we encounter. Think of all those shots of people walking the streets in slow motion, the high overhead shots of people inhabiting the city, the shots of the buildings themselves, etc. It strikes me that Lonergan is making a statement about the kind of society we've built, a place where it's beneficial to have a self-serving attitude and to avoid making any significant waves that "rock the boat," so to speak. It's so much easier for everyone involved to lie about the bus accident than it is to admit the truth, and in that way, a subtle but powerful truth about the nature of modern capitalist society is revealed. We're conditioned to look out for number one above all else. And because Lisa is so young and hasn't been fully conditioned yet, that conflict between her naive pursuit of the truth and the harshness of "the way the world really works" (under this system) becomes the central theme of the film.

Even though she can't necessarily articulate it fully, she sees something wrong with society itself, or, at the very least, she's becoming aware that her pain is being exacerbated by the fact that society is trying to corrupt her instinct to be honest and do the right thing. In some ways, it's a film about resisting the "brainwashing" or social conditioning that is necessary to keep things running "smoothly" in this society. Because the more people wake up, the more people begin to see the evil behind the dominant self-serving worldview through which this society functions, the more the people who profit off the rest of us through this system become threatened. And in this way, her instinct to tell the truth, her eventual insistence on pursuing the truth even if it's inconvenient, becomes a form of rebellion against the dominant ideology of society.

It's actually a very anti-establishment message that can be derived from the subtext and context of the film, since Lisa's "coming of age" is portrayed as almost a kind of political awakening, in the sense of politics manifesting themselves through the actions of individuals making moral choices. She emerges at the end as not just self-aware, but aware of a deeper truth about society, having become a fully formed adult by way of resisting the system's social conditioning to "go along to get along."





A voice made of ink... and rage.

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Hi FedRev,

Thanks for the appreciations - and right back at ya. Just now making it back here to see if there were responses ...

I too fully concur with your extension here - I see it similarly (perhaps in part because i've been identifying with 'anti-establishment' since the term first came into fashion in my own young adulthood), but found myself long-winded enough just making the case for the characters in the film per se and the various facets of the overall message I see each playing. So I'm very glad that you ran with the ball to the goal post in the bigger 'stadium' [eesh -metaphors!] ...

I definitely agree that - especially with Lonergan's framing of the entire film with the crowd shots which, especially by the end, we are virtually obliged to see as conveying the sense that this was but one story catalyzed by an encounter among 'strangers' (on a strange planet indeed) and reminding us to drop our jaws in due respect that we are clueless about the infinite other stories in the crowd of strangers that also entail life-defining moments and put us one-by-one into face-to-face sudden confrontation with our own moral compass, individually and collectively.

While the crowd shot overview perspective of course means a crowd which, by extension, includes myriad other Lisa-like stories we will never know in their specifics and also, by extension, even more myriads of folks who are in their own lives taking the "cave to establishment" or whatever other kind of easy (and less morally informed compass) route through their daily Big and little dilemmas, I think his choice of protagonist, through whose eyes we have seen this trauma unfold, puts his chief interest in the myriad manifestations of Lisa out there - the yet-to-be-hardened-yet-to-sell-out (meaning mostly the young) people in the crowd who are searching for a compass, for a model of adulthood that isn't riddled with contradiction, complicity, and outright caving. And maybe it's through that focus that the rest of us are indeed meant to (or at least can choose to) reflect seriously on our own respective compasses and contradictions and complicities.

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FedRev, I was directed here from FG, and yes, it's a good conversation. cetaylor's is a fine OP. I've watched and discussed the film numerous times, but the thoughts are so well formulated there that it is like seeing some elements of it anew. Then you've broadened out the discussion. I haven't too much more to add, except to draw attention to a detail which you've reminded me of, and which I've now just read up on a little more.

The talk that Lisa's class are given dealing with strike breaking is an important reference point, supplemental to the point that you are making here. In this representative episode from American history, the response to those - strikers - who were rocking the boat was that X politician, "sent in the National Guard and shot them down." And the teacher in the room doesn't take this item of information as his cue to put the topic to rest by "drawing conclusions," but instead says, "And that's it. That's really all there is to say." The speaker also names President William McKinley. Brokered by a mine-owning Republican senator, striking coal miners won certain concessions in the run-up to 1900 McKinley's re-election (before he himself was shot down). Knock-on issues from this strikers' victory precipitated a large scale strike in Pennsylvania in 1902, which was suppressed by the National Guard. In an echo of Margaret's present day, McKinley was another US president engaged in a colonial war, in that instance with Spain.

This is also McKinley: "We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is manifest destiny." I never quite had a satisfactory answer for the significance of Lisa's fateful desire for that most significant object, the cowboy hat, and that whole aspect of the film, but building upon the OP's reading of the film, and your modulation of it, I think that these further details knit in rather well to that.

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Quite beautifully stated. Writer-director Lonergan said in an interview, "One of the main ideas of the story is that she (Lisa) finds out that she’s not the only person in the world, which she knew in theory, but it’s really proven to her by experiences" and in the film he takes us on a journey to places and experiences Lisa has never had before to get to a spot from which she can begin adulthood. The relationship between Lisa and her mom is the changing template upon which Lisa emotionally works out her discoveries.
In the beginning of the film Lisa is full of herself, to be sure, but her relationship with her mom, Joan, is actually very good with only the veneer of appropriate adolescent bitchiness in evidence.
It's only when Joan basically tells Lisa to lie to the police that Lisa's view of a just world is upended and her relationship with mom crumbles into the wreck it becomes. It's that recognition of the needs of other lives - that she is appalled by at first - that fuels the film. What follows is, well, everything you said.
Someone should up bring the Hopkins poem, but it's been mentioned so many times here it doesn't need to be again.

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hi Jlent, and thanks.

I'll pick up on one of your phrasings to elaborate a bit, guessing that you may well agree with this but it seems worth making explicit: When you say Lisa is "full of herself" (and i'm probably elaborating on this because of other threads where I saw people finger-wagging at her as solipsistic or self-involved - a word i think was used), to my mind Lisa was being mostly "just" an adolescent - in one of the variant manifestations of what it means to be adolescent which mostly boil down to variations on being self-conscious, emphasis on 'self' - not derogatorily but precisely because adolescence is on the cusp of what is supposed to become a "formed self" in adulthood.

All the points I saw as illustrating, adult by adult, the many ways adults failed her as role models can also be seen on the flip side, as all the many mirrors or would-be mirrors that Lisa was self-consciously looking in to see how adults were perceiving her as much as whether she could find in them something credible, trustworthy, consistent, coherent to pay attention to. So that a key pivot in her own evolution that leads her to decide how to resolve her dilemma is finally losing some of that self-consciousness to the point of being willing to take a position that she has no basis for believing any of those adults in her life will favor her taking. Yet it took being disabused of any grounds for putting any of them on pedestals that was surely essential to Lisa's ability to say essentially "Screw it - I don't see anyone living out a coherent point of view on life decisions that i can respect enough to make them my judge and jury, or role model, so i just have to do the thing that is going to square with my own sense of moral compass" - having learned as much by negative example - or maybe only by negative example - to trust herself. (I think the hypocritical cousin-lawyer-scene was a bit of a 'final straw' in this direction)...

As to the poem: In my view, Lonergan takes the poem's point of view and puts a twist on it. As I read it anyway, Hopkins is focused mostly on loss of innocence (which is putting it too simplistically but imho essentially comes down to that) ... and ends with Margaret in mourning - with the learned understanding from life's pains of loss that brings poignancy to that which touches us and makes it no longer a matter of carefree appreciations. I think Lisa ends with something more complex than mourning or loss of innocence. That's what she was struggling with throughout the film but by the end, she has dug out of it for herself imho a compensating blossoming - a choice she made to trust her own inner compass ultimately is a sign that, alongside, yes, the disillusionment of finding unreliable life models, she has found something that will keep her from feeling jaded or mournful or cynical about adulthood and beyond (a sense that she indeed had a choice which allowed her to take an action, not just be reactive, and moreover an action that she can wake up and respect herself in the morning* for)...

* so maybe the twist on the poem is a kind of "mourning + morning" -- sorry, too cute by half.

Instead of "just" mourning, as for Margaret, i think Lisa's tender moment with her mom in the opera signifies that she's also found compassion and a take on grief that allows a realization of the blessing of connection, wherever one can find it and knowing that it won't be with someone who will stand up to every test, just as her mom didn't, but her mom has evolved too, even if only to the degree of applauding Lisa for being true to her convictions in the end. (I sense I'm sounding rather glib here aka trying to tie things up in a bow - which is not my intention nor how i felt about the film's ending.)

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I don't know if this is the right thread, but I just felt like pointing something out. Lisa had the very idealistic notion or purpose that the driver should admit his responsability in the accidental killing of the woman, just like she did. The difference lies in the fact that she's not gonna suffer any sort of punishement or consequences for this.

Now, I know she doesn't have any legal responsability on this, and she knows if she had not distracted the bus driver this would've never happened, but I bet she wouldn't have changed her statement or pursued this matter like she did if there were actually legal repercussions, like jail time, to what she did.

Of course we can only wonder, but I think she was being very hypocritical and selfish in her moral crusade, only because she knew she was safe from a legal standpoint and wanted to clear her guilty conscience.

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I think she was being very hypocritical and selfish in her moral crusade

That's one way to look at it, but it's not how I see it. I think, while on her crusade to get the bus driver punished, she is also discovering her own guilt. She's going through a process of self-discovery, as well as a process of discovery about how society functions. So, it's not simply that she's being "hypocritical" or "selfish" because she knows she won't get in trouble. I think what she's up against is the frustration that society is incapable of administering real justice in this situation, and since she learns that she isn't going to get in trouble for her mistake she feels like she has to do something to make things right.






A voice made of ink... and rage.

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CoSMiGoNoN, you captured Lisa perfectly. She didn't know how to handle her own guilt, so she tried to crucify the bus driver. She was a hypocrite and completely self-absorbed in her "moral" campaign to absolve herself from herself.

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Wonderful analysis, cetaylor3. And the great thing about this profound and subtle movie is that there could be equally insightful and valid analyses of other facets, such as the need for love.

By coincidence, the previous movie I had watched was "East of Eden" (1955) and I thought "... and now for something completely different" as I loaded "Margaret" - Extended Cut. In fact, the main theme of both films is the same. Adolescents from single-parent families who feel starved of love become malicious and destructive, eventually arriving at the beginnings of adult maturity.

I rate it 9 in my personal collection (10 is reserved for a small handful of all-time classics) but, as I rate a point lower than IMDb raters on average, I am rating it "10" here.

I was beginning to thank that the US could no longer make truly adult, intelligent films, and that these were only forthcoming from Europe and the newer cinemas of Asia. But this is as good as anything made anywhere in the world.

I suppose this is (among other things) of the "coming of age" genre, but it is so much more realistic than the usual formulaic Hollywood crap.

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