Gilbert Films

Recent News

• Lonergan’s ‘Margaret’ finally gets a trailer
• Lonergan’s ‘Margaret’ to finally hit theaters
• Indie Producer Gary Gilbert Talks Mark Ruffalo, Margaret, Kids Are All Right, New Pics

The story of a New York City teenager, her actress mother, and the girl’s ado­les­cent cru­sade through the thick­ets and tan­gles of the grown-up world as she tries to make amends for her com­plic­ity in a ter­ri­ble accident.

Out shop­ping  for a cow­boy hat for an upcom­ing fam­ily vaca­tion Lisa Cohen, a 17 year old high school girl from Manhattan’s ultra-liberal Upper West Side, spots a bus dri­ver wear­ing the exact hat she’s search­ing for; she runs along­side the bus attempt­ing to get the driver’s atten­tion while he waves back and flirts with her instead of look­ing where he is going.  His con­cen­tra­tion on Lisa, he runs a red light and hits a woman cross­ing the street, sev­er­ing her leg. Lisa is the first to reach the woman, who dies in her arms.  When the police inter­view them after the acci­dent nei­ther Lisa nor the bus dri­ver says any­thing about their inter­ac­tion or the  bus run­ning the light.

Lisa goes home and tries to return to her nor­mal teenage life. But after a few days of guilt-wracked strain she tells her  mother, Joan, a divorced the­ater actress, what really hap­pened — hop­ing for some firm adult urg­ing to go back to the cops and tell the truth. But she catches her well-meaning mother at a moment of dis­trac­tion, and Joan’s first reac­tion is the same as Lisa’s: Why get the dri­ver in trou­ble when it was just an acci­dent? This is not the answer Lisa is look­ing for, and from that moment she pri­vately turns against Joan with the full crush­ing power of a wounded adolescent.

Writhing with frus­trated moral pur­pose and burn­ing sex­ual guilt Lisa engages on a dou­ble cru­sade – to atone for what she’s done and to pun­ish her mother for not pro­vid­ing her with the con­crete solu­tion she was look­ing for. As the rest of her life refuses to sim­plify itself at school, with her friends, teach­ers, and  her dis­tant father in Cal­i­for­nia, Lisa begins to act out sex­u­ally. She  reck­lessly loses her vir­gin­ity to an older boy in school,  does every­thing she can to seduce her hand­some young geom­e­try teacher, and sys­tem­at­i­cally tor­ments her mother whose life is oth­er­wise tak­ing a turn for the bet­ter — with a new man on the scene and a big suc­cess on the Off-Broadway stage.

When Lisa finally tracks down the bus dri­ver and urges him to go with her the police with the full story, he aggres­sively denies any wrong­do­ing.  She is backed down but not scared off and now she deter­mines to see him pun­ished: Arrested or fired or both.  She  enlists the help of the dead woman’s  best friend, Emily, a tough-minded woman brim­ming over with the deter­mi­na­tion and single-mindedness Lisa so bit­terly finds lack­ing in her  gen­tler mother.  With Emily pro­vid­ing cogent adult guid­ance and a moral fury exceed­ing her own, Lisa launches into a cam­paign against the bus dri­ver that gives her the clar­ity of pur­pose she’s been hun­ger­ing for.

But Lisa dis­cov­ers that  jus­tice in the adult world a lot harder to man­i­fest than her  abso­lutist ado­les­cent mind could have ever con­ceived. Con­fronted with the police department’s refusal to  re-open the case, and the labyrinthine com­plex­i­ties of a real-life civil law­suit, despite all her  for­ti­tude in the end she sim­ply can­not suc­ceed in get­ting the dri­ver fired from his job. The best the law can pro­vide  is a set­tle­ment to the dead woman’s money-grubbing rel­a­tives in Ari­zona, which they are delighted to accept.

Her cru­sade foiled and her unyield­ing teenage ide­al­ism dealt its mor­tal blow, Lisa finally relents in her sav­age cam­paign against her  mother’s imper­fec­tions, and at the eleventh hour at least dis­cov­ers the more humane balm of for­give­ness and generosity.