Manchester by the Sea

Lonergan is a slightly better screenwriter than a director and a way better director than a man with a feeling for choosing music. One of the best written and performed "classic American small - town dramas about unsolvable skeletons in closets" in recent years scores an own goal good with cheap targeted selection of classical string music. It is overused here and the most overplayed songs were chosen. It´s fishing for emotions, full of pathos, ingratiating and cheap solution. Which is in stark contrast to everything else, because Manchester does not offer anything that even remotely associated with pathos (let alone fishing for emotions) (and there are sequences that would clearly call for it) and there are not cheap ways out. As if the author did not believe that his own theme, actors he chose and dialogues he wrote, which phenomenally work with the unspoken "between the lines", will be enough for an emotionally overwhelming subtle drama, so he decided to make 100 % sure it happens but in a cheapest possible way. And it unnecessarily devalues an otherwise impressive experience. (02/02/2017)

Manchester-by-the-Sea isn’t really a village that I would like to visit, even though I normally like similar areas and I actively seek them out. But what can you do with people who look as if they had been taking Xanax for two years, surviving in their strange vacuum of nothingness. Well, and Casey Affleck is rooted in this world, and probably wants to get an Oscar nomination because he is the weirdest of the weirdest and in some scenes he literally jumps between emotions like a flea from one hair to another. It’s a pity, as under diferrent circumstances this film wouldn’t be bad. But its endless length and the strange behavior of the characters doesn’t simply make for a good movie and the few interesting scenes unfortunately can’t save the movie. (02/21/2017)

This review contains minor spoilers. Manchester by the Sea is one of the most useful film simulators for living with a broken heart. You can either let tragedy paralyze you completely or you can maintain a certain detachment from it – as Lonergan does, and as the protagonists of Manchester by the Sea also try to do. The film does not restore the status quo or reassure us that everything will be all right again. The real catharsis and return to harmony captured in a few flashbacks do not come, just as deliverance and at least some form of satisfaction after a similar tragedy may never come in real life. This is not the only departure from the conventions of American family melodramas, which usually offer simple solutions to similar dilemmas. The tragedy is not caused by fate, against which one can do nothing, but by human error; the characters are not rendered in black-and-white and, unlike the protagonists of ordinary melodramas, they are largely unable to externalise their emotions. Rather, their emotions are expressed for them through flashbacks and solemn music, which at the same time make us aware of the constant (and paradoxical) presence of loss, of an empty place (even more painful on second viewing are the mentions of the children in the dialogue – the man who repairs the dripping faucet for Lee speaks about his sister and her children; the doctor reports that the nurse Bethany has just given birth to twin girls). Like the female protagonist of Lonergan’s previous film, Patrick and Lee mainly have to learn to overcome the communication barrier and to find adequate words to describe the misfortune that they have endured (as, for example, the man whose boiler Lee repairs at the end has no problem with it and who uninhibitedly launches into a story about his father’s death). Unlike Lisa, however, they do not act melodramatically, despite the melodramatic potential of the situations in which they find themselves. Conversely, even the scenes that are shot with operatic exaggeration are disrupted by their unwillingness to let themselves be fully overcome by grief (Patrick’s ringing phone during the memorial service). People die, but the lives of those they leave behind go on. Manchester by the Sea, a melodrama that doesn’t want to be a melodrama, is thus for me not only a superbly written and acted drama about insurmountable loss, but also a film that is both formalistically and stylistically inspiring. 85% (02/10/2017)

Formal austerity, characters that are difficult to penetrate and even more difficult to leave, the impossibility of communication and escape from one's own past, from one's own life. An excellently constructed script that, by gradually revealing the past, allows us to slowly become attached to the main character, with whom we also seem to be searching for a glimmer of hope in the bleak psychological darkness. Casey Affleck's performance is once again chillingly convincing and depressing, but the young Hedges or, for those few minutes, the mesmerizing Michelle Williams are not far behind. To my complete satisfaction, it lacks a slightly steadier pace, and at times I didn't entirely agree with the onslaught of the pervasive depression that tests the flow of tear ducts at the expense of maintaining pure authenticity. That said, the impression is very intense and the ending cinematically beautiful, life is a ungrateful bitch and Lonergan has an apt balladic way of telling it. 80% (02/28/2017)

A drama that does not hold your hand, forces you to read between the lines, and does so on a canvas over two hours long that does not begin with careless and ordinary dialogues full of chatter. Casey Affleck has found the role of his life, Michelle Williams shines even in a smaller space, and Kenneth Lonergan has created a drama that is almost too absolute and overwhelming to be heartfelt. Still, I wish him all the success in the awards season. (02/02/2017)