The opening shot of Margaret s Museum looks like a painting by Andrew Wyeth, of a little clapboard cottage in a sea of grass on a cliffside. Two visitors drive up to the museum, and a moment later one runs from the house screaming. Then a title card takes us back three years earlier. As openings go, this one plays as if it belongs on another film. That it doesn t gradually becomes clear. We are in the mining town of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in the late 1940s, where the coal pits take a terrible toll in life and limb and where Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) and her family live in half a house, because the earth subsided into a mine shaft beneath the other half.