Kenneth Lonergan‘s Margaret was shot a couple of years ago but won’t be out until sometime in ’09. All sorts of legal problems have be-deviled it, I’m told. There was a really long cut. I guess that means what it means, but how could the guy who directed and wrote the straight and truthful You Can Count On Me mess things up so badly that Margaret hasn’t been shown to anyone I know, hasn’t been shown or booked at any festivals and Fox Searchlight hasn’t even assigned an ’09 release date?

The new high-def trailer for Susan Montford‘s While She Was Out (Anchor Bay, 12.12), which I can’t find an embed code for, is a much more slicker and sophisticated thing that the trailer that went up in late October. The movie is basically a damp and nocturnal Straw Dogs/Death Wish/Wait Until Dark in the suburbs (and in a soaked surburban forest during the third act) with Kim Basinger in the Dustin Hoffman/Charles Bronson/Audrey Hepburn role.

“It’s funny, but when you’re in the business, you can tell something in the first minutes of watching, particularly in terms of the actors. And at the start of Frozen River, the first thing I saw I went, ‘Oh! oh!’ I don’t even know the director (Courtney Hunt), but there was such a documentary feel to that performance by Melissa Leo. I don’t know Melissa Leo, but that’s an extraordinary piece of work. There’s not a false moment. I felt she knew it and lived that life.” — Dustin Hoffman, quoted in an an 11.26 Variety posting.

Add this endorsement to Roger Ebert‘s “Deep Vote” endorsement (“Best performance of the year, hands down…the public isn’t sure who Leo is, but she’s been working since 1984 and has 76 film and TV credits…every actor in the business has worked with her, except for Kevin Bacon…if they work together, the Game grows exponentially…actors nominate actors”), and you’re left with a growing feeling that Leo’s stock is rising.

To put it another way, it would be very gratifying to me personally if she didn’t get the blow-off that the Gurus o’ Gold, those Zelig-minded, sometimes-behind-the-curve tea-leaf readers, seem to think may be in the cards, as evidenced by their placing Leo second (under Michelle Williams) on their Dark Horse contender chart.

Tina Brown‘s nomination of Rachel Maddow to host Meet The Press is inspired. She’d be great, she’d keep things lively, she knows how to tapdance but not be overly deferential or softball (like the show’s temporary host Tom Brokaw clearly was last weekend during his Laura Bush interview), and she’d bring in the ratings.

“If Obama is post-racial, Maddow is post-gender,” writes Brown, “divested of hair-frosted femininity in the anchor genre and more appealing because of it. Like him, she’s a calm, unflappable new era phenomenon. Sure, she’s a lefty, and in the past week she’s been swinging away at Obama’s cabinet choices, but I suspect she’s ambitious enough to dial it back if she had to. (She also has that weird TV gene that’s so hungry for air time she’d probably insist on keeping her five-day job at MSNBC. Russert himself was on every show except Project Runway.)”

Brown allows that “maybe this kind of seismic move asks too much of NBC brass.

“NBC seems to be paralyzed by the sense that whomever they chose has to be another Tim Russert. Not so. Russert defined an era, but that era is over. It’s as if in the months since he died the hands of the clock have spun with accelerated speed, leaving us all with a desire for reinvention. There’s been an Obama effect in every sphere of business from General Motors to network TV.

“Meet the Press has to change not just the host but the show itself. It may be successful now, but the winds of change could suddenly engulf it as they have the giants of print.”

I’m not understanding this Gurus o’ Gold Dark Horse chart, which was updated yesterday. Where are the Bright Horses? Is Guru ringmaster David Poland telling us things are too vague and uncertain for Bright Horses to be named? The Gold Derby Buzzmeter crowd (to which I belong) had no problem naming their top-ranked Best Actor and Best Actress picks in their just-posted chart.

Richard Jenkins

I’ll tell you who one of the Bright Horses is — The Visitor‘s Richard Jenkins . His inhabiting of an emotionally tucked-under middle-aged academic who gradually blossoms through his relationship with a small family of immigrants is the crowning performance of his career. And yet the Gurus have him down as the leading Dark Horse. What the holy fuck does that mean? Jenkins is a gifted, charming and resourceful actor — one of the most nimble and dependable artist-craftsmen in the business. And then The Visitor comes along and he hits it out the park, and that’s a Dark thing?

I’ll tell you what Jenkins’ Darkness means. It means that the Gurus believe him to be a worthy outside-shotter because his campaign isn’t being supported by Big Money (i.e., Overture, which doesn’t have the pockets of the major distributors), and because the Bright Horse contenders (whom the Gurus don’t name) are more deeply rooted in the industry’s emotional terra firma — Sean Penn, Clint Eastwood, Leonardo DiCaprio, Frank Langella — or, in the case of The Wrestler‘s Mickey Rourke, because Jenkins isn’t a contrite Comeback Kid looking for absolution.

It’s wrong, wrong, wrong for Jenkins to be saddled with this classification. It’s happened because of safe, tepid, pack-mentality thinking, and the age-old impulse to kowtow to economically and emotionally established celebrity club members. I pick my favorites this way also — let’s be honest — but I’ve near once dreamt of downgrading Jenkins to Dark Horse status. It’s unthinkable. His Visitor turn is too sublime, too full of feeling in a disciplined, carefully measured way.

Jenkins and Visitor costar Hiam Abass.

Every Best Actor lineup needs a less glamorous, lower-wattage, hard-working indie type to round things out — that’s Jenkins. Just as Frozen River‘s attractive and super-talented Melissa Leo needs to fill that slot among the Best Actress nominees.

My top seven choices for Best Actor picks are Jenkins, Rourke, Revolutionary Road‘s DiCaprio, Milk‘s Sean Penn, Che‘s Benicio del Toro, Frost/Nixon‘s Langella and W.‘s Josh Brolin. I can’t make it five yet. My heart won’t permit it. Give me time.

In a just-out Vanity Fair cover story by Maureen Dowd, Tina Fey‘s troll-ish musician-composer husband Jeff Richmond recalls that “when we were first dating [in 1994], some of the guys at Second City said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be a hoot if we go over…'”

“‘…over to the Doll House,”‘ Fey finishes. “‘We’ll go to this strip club ironically.’ I was like, ‘The fuck you will.’

“‘I know how she feels about some things,” Richmond tells Dowd later on. “We never had to deal with any of this but, like, adultery. Just looking at examples from other people’s lives, we know that anything like that, messing around, is just such a complete ‘no’ to her. And she has her principles and she sticks to her principles more than anybody I’ve ever met in my life. Like that whole idea of, if you are in a relationship, there are deal breakers.

“‘There’s not a lot of gray area in being flirty with somebody. She’s very black-and-white: ‘We’re married — you can’t.’ [Richmond] calls their marriage ‘borderline boring — in a good way.’ And Fey concurs: ‘I don’t enjoy any kind of danger or volatility. I don’t have that kind of ‘I love the bad guys’ thing. No, no thank you. I like nice people.'”

People in successful marriages — i.e., the ones that more or less “work” — know this, but it’s not written about or discussed all that much. To be in a stable marriage you have to accept — no, embrace — borderline boring as a day-to-day fact of life. But woebetide the marriage that tips a bit deeper into stasis and becomes draggy or soul-stifling. Or, for that matter, the husband or wife who imagines he or she can get away with a little flirty tingle (or worse) on the side.

Okay, you can for a while, especially if you approach it in the right way (i.e., like a CIA agent in East Germany during the height of the Cold War) but all catting-around comes out in the wash sooner or later.

Marriage can be really tough. If things take a wrong turn it can weigh on your soul. It’s not for sissies or dilletantes. Sometimes I think Tilda Swinton and her husband have a fairly good thing going.

But as many men have said to themselves (particularly when young), “What is life without at least a little risk?” I’m not talking about infidelity. I’m saying that knowing or feeling that your vibrancy or currency isn’t gathering dust on the shelf, that it is valued or sought out by others, can lift your heart and soul up and out in all directions — glowingly, resplendently. And we all need that. We also know that most marriages come up short as far as providing that kind of nurturing or inspiration.

To be in a good marriage you have to either be very passionate and creative about giving this to your mate, or else be very resigned and almost farm-animal-like in the knowledge that you’re just going to have to do without. We know this.

Back from The Seagull and just waking up to Slumdog Millionaire winning big at the British Independent Film Awards, which ended five or six hours ago. Danny Boyle‘s film took the Best Picture and Best Director awards, and star Dev Patel was named Most Promising Newcomer. Steve McQueen‘s Hunger won three also — Best Debut Director award, Best Actor award for Michael Fassbender, and Best Technical Achievement for Sean Bobbitt‘s cinematography.

Sports writer Pat Jordan‘s interview piece on Wrestler star Mickey Rourke in today’s N.Y. Times Magazine starts out fairly rough. In terms of his interview “performance”, he calls Rourke likable but clumsy, lost in his rap, emotionally insincere. In short Jordan isn’t buying the shpiel, which sets him apart from others who’ve written generally flattering profiles of Mickey-the-Comeback-Kid. A departure from the script.

“You meet Mickey, you can’t help liking him,” Jordan begins. “He rescues abused dogs! He cries a lot: over his stepfather’s supposed abuse; the loss of his brother to cancer and his dogs to old age; the failure of his marriage to the actress Carre Otis. He admits he destroyed his own career, because, as he puts it: “I was arrogant…I wasn’t smart enough or educated enough” to deal with stardom.

“He is candid about the people he has crossed paths with: Nicole Kidman is “an ice cube”; Michael Cimino, the director of Heaven’s Gate, “is crazy” and “nuts”; and the producer Samuel Goldwyn Jr. is “a liar.”

“So what if he cries at the same moment in the same story in every interview? So what if his candor sometimes sounds like the bad dialogue from one of his many bad movies (“I have no one to go to to fix the broken pieces in myself”) or that his self-deprecation seems culled from the stock stories of so many fading actors (“I was in 7-Eleven, and this guy says, ‘Didn’t you used to be a movie star?'”)? So what if he seems disingenuous, at best, when he says he can’t remember that critics nominated him one of the world’s worst actors in 1991 (“I probably would have voted with them”) or even making a terrible movie that went straight to video, Exit in Red, in 1996 — despite the fact that the love interest in that movie was then his wife?

“Mickey Rourke is, after all, an actor. The roles he has played and the life he has lived have so blurred one into another in his mind’s eye that even he doesn’t seem to know when he’s acting or when he’s being real. He has spent his entire adult life playing not fictional characters but an idealized delusional fantasy of himself.”

I don’t know if this piece is going to do much for Rourke’s Best Actor chances. I suspect that the die is cast on Rourke being nominated (i.e., it’ll happen) and this or that article isn’t going to change things in this regard.

“Sober intelligence goes only so far in crafting an effective bigscreen version of the international bestseller The Reader,” says Variety‘s Todd McCarthy. “German author Bernhard Schlink‘s succinct, widely admired 1995 novel uses a late-1950s affair between a former concentration camp guard (Kate Winslet) and a teenager half her age (David Kross) to explore both generations’ difficulty in coming to terms with German war guilt. Stephen Daldry‘s film is sensitively realized and dramatically absorbing, but comes across as an essentially cerebral experience without gut impact.”