Kenneth Lonergan has an undeniable talent for showing people at their least attractive. Margaret is chock-full of quality scenes where people act like selfish, obnoxious, insufferable assholes, completely oblivious to their own foulness. The problem is, none of these scenes are connected to the others in any meaningful way, other than they all involve the same jerky teenage girl, played by Anna Paquin, and are at least peripherally connected to the central story of her character, which is this: she gets an innocent woman killed by distracting a New York City bus driver, and then she dedicates her life to shirking the whole thing off on the bus driver and trying to get him fired. Obviously this is not uplifting stuff we are talking about here. We are exploring the pits of human petty self-righteousness, and not in a way that is at all useful or interesting. I’m sure Lonergan thinks he is making a deep statement about the human condition, but it sure didn’t impress me. Aside from the technical satisfaction of capturing so much assholish behavior on film, this movie has nothing of any substance to offer the viewer.