Cannes 2008: Kenneth Lonergan’s Margaret?

This one has boggled my mind now for a while and often have wondered out loud: what the hell is happening with the release of Kenneth Lonergan’s follow up to You Can Count On Me? I myself have asked on repeated occasions to Fox Searchlight Pictures folk on what the status is on this title.

Chud has decided to put pieces of the mystery together on a film that was shot and completed in the fall of 2005 – and they have got a significant piece of news from actress Olivia Thirlby (who has a supporting role in the picture) who is quoted as saying; “I think what I’ve heard is just that they’re trying to cut it down,
because the script as we shot it was about 300 pages.  And, yeah, it
was epic and it’s a film that is merely – I shouldn’t say merely – but
it’s simply about a girl who is in the wake of a tragic accident that
she was not a part of but she just witnessed, and it’s about her kind
of acting out in bizarre ways, and it’s about her mother and her
classmates and her teachers, and, you know, it’s a kind of a slow quiet
film.  I think they’re just trying to get it down to an acceptable
length and, you know, Kenny Lonergan is brilliant but I think that
sometimes he’s still more of a playwright than a filmmaker.“

Starring Anna Paquin, Matt Damon, Mark Ruffalo, J. Smith-Cameron, Matthew Broderick and Jean Reno, Margaret centers on a 17-year-old New York City high-school student (Paquin) who feels
certain that she inadvertently played a role in a traffic accident that has
claimed a woman’s life. In her attempts to set things right she meets with
opposition at every step. Torn apart with frustration, she begins emotionally
brutalizing her family, her friends, her teachers, and most of all, herself. She
has been confronted quite unexpectedly with a basic truth: that her youthful
ideals are on a collision course against the realities and compromises of the
adult world.

Very recently, I’ve read via Screen Daily that indeed, the film has a chance to splash on the croisette – the only question is? what is the run time – how much did they cut and how much did they keep and what did they keep?