Manchester By The Sea (15.)
Directed by Kenneth Lonergan.
Starring Casey Affleck, Lucas Hedges, Kyle Chandler, C.J. Snow, Gretchen Mol and Michelle Williams. 135 mins.
This offers audiences a challenging proposition: a 135-minute long Casey Affleck character study. Like all reasonable people, I have been stirred and inspired by the way the lesser Affleck has risen out of his brother's shadow and forged a really quite impressive movie career for himself, mixing up supporting roles with character leads. A lot of the appeal is that he works sparingly and never allows his face to become too familiar. Here though, he's playing a bottled up man who isn't very articulate, usually swears when he does speak, or expresses himself in punch ups. Which means that you've committed yourself to two and a quarter hours of looking at his his puzzled child, scrunched up face, and listening to his halting, mumbled expression. In the cold.
(Him and Ben are an amazing pair, they look so alike and yet so different. How can two men have fundamentally the same face and yet one is a leading man and the other is character actor? The two could be cast as Steptoe brothers.)
Manchester by the Sea is a film about receiving and responding to bad news. Very bad news. It begins with a surly, unapproachable handy man (Affleck) finding out his brother has died but there's more to come. In flashbacks we see him in happier times, before something even worse happened to him. Waiting to find out what this is, appears to be the film's main narrative tension, though the film actually reveals it after about an hour. Most of the time before and after is spent wandering around in the winter cold of the Massachusetts port of the title.
Lonergan's previous film Margaret got only a fleeting release due to a post-production dispute with its distributors and the film was almost buried until a few reviewers sought it out and reclaimed it from the dead earth with their rave reviews. This follow up is also getting universal acclaim for it marvellous acting and understated drama. Which is fine but my problem with it is that in a very real and heartfelt sense I just couldn't give a flying Expletive Deleted about any of it. I rummaged around trying to find a toss to give, but I came up empty.
It archetypal so-cold-you-can-see-their-breath-when-they-speak mumble fish, meant to win us over with its unforced integrity, that what we are seeing is real and raw. But it isn't. I, Daniel Blake feels real and raw but this is fundamentally bogus in the way only artfully disguised theatrics can be.
Directed by Kenneth Lonergan.
Starring Casey Affleck, Lucas Hedges, Kyle Chandler, C.J. Snow, Gretchen Mol and Michelle Williams. 135 mins.
This offers audiences a challenging proposition: a 135-minute long Casey Affleck character study. Like all reasonable people, I have been stirred and inspired by the way the lesser Affleck has risen out of his brother's shadow and forged a really quite impressive movie career for himself, mixing up supporting roles with character leads. A lot of the appeal is that he works sparingly and never allows his face to become too familiar. Here though, he's playing a bottled up man who isn't very articulate, usually swears when he does speak, or expresses himself in punch ups. Which means that you've committed yourself to two and a quarter hours of looking at his his puzzled child, scrunched up face, and listening to his halting, mumbled expression. In the cold.
(Him and Ben are an amazing pair, they look so alike and yet so different. How can two men have fundamentally the same face and yet one is a leading man and the other is character actor? The two could be cast as Steptoe brothers.)
Manchester by the Sea is a film about receiving and responding to bad news. Very bad news. It begins with a surly, unapproachable handy man (Affleck) finding out his brother has died but there's more to come. In flashbacks we see him in happier times, before something even worse happened to him. Waiting to find out what this is, appears to be the film's main narrative tension, though the film actually reveals it after about an hour. Most of the time before and after is spent wandering around in the winter cold of the Massachusetts port of the title.
Lonergan's previous film Margaret got only a fleeting release due to a post-production dispute with its distributors and the film was almost buried until a few reviewers sought it out and reclaimed it from the dead earth with their rave reviews. This follow up is also getting universal acclaim for it marvellous acting and understated drama. Which is fine but my problem with it is that in a very real and heartfelt sense I just couldn't give a flying Expletive Deleted about any of it. I rummaged around trying to find a toss to give, but I came up empty.
It archetypal so-cold-you-can-see-their-breath-when-they-speak mumble fish, meant to win us over with its unforced integrity, that what we are seeing is real and raw. But it isn't. I, Daniel Blake feels real and raw but this is fundamentally bogus in the way only artfully disguised theatrics can be.
