Kenneth Lonergan's MANCHESTER BY THE SEA

prob first film i've ever seen where one of my chief criticisms is "too much Handel"

with the big climactic Williams/Affleck scene, i really felt i was watching actors and not characters

staa trek

previously on the MARGARET thread:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/11/07/the-cinematic-traumas-of-kenneth-lonergan

― Number None, Monday, October 31, 2016 3:38 PM (two months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

manchester by the sea is p great imo. loved casey affleck in it

― harold melvin and the bluetones (jim in vancouver), Monday, October 31, 2016 4:08 PM (two months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh cool, we saw Little Men yesterday and I told tt it reminded me a bit of Margaret so we have to watch it now

― imago, Monday, October 31, 2016 4:19 PM (two months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

two months pass...
I'm not sure how I felt about the film overall but jesus christ the big Williams/Affleck scene at the end is just utterly devastating

― Number None, Saturday, January 28, 2017 9:49 PM (two days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Surely this deserves a thread of its own?

― Matt DC, Sunday, January 29, 2017 7:30 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

saw this a few weeks ago & was surprised there wasn't a thread or much discussion (even a post search just revealed a lot of lists of titles on that dreadful tetris thread)

I saw a preview which meant I went in without having seen a trailer, which probably helped. I really liked it, I was chuckling pretty much start to finish while also finding it quite affecting

― wins, Sunday, January 29, 2017 7:38 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

wasn't too sure about the broderick bit tho, it was funny but at a different pitch to the rest of the film, seemed like?

― wins, Sunday, January 29, 2017 7:45 AM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I liked this but yeah def "too much Handel". I never felt I was watching an acting masterclass at any point and it went in directions I wasn't expecting

Williams telling unruly guests to shut the fuck up >>>> Williams-Affleck scene

Keep the hot takes coming, ILF cretins.

me and my wife saw this on our first date after having a baby. not cool

I quite liked the movie and didn't mind the unexpected directions; the first fifty minutes are the best sustained direction of Lonergan's career.

Michelle W def great w/ the F-bombs

it was well cast and written but i'm not sure it's not the least of KL's three films

jeez, Heez

it was well cast and written but i'm not sure it's not the least of KL's three films

this is m/l what I thought too

we're talking about three of the best American movies of the last twenty years, so it's mild criticism.

the most remarkable thing about MBTS is the total emotional stasis of Affleck's character- begins and ends with a bar fight. he's almost like a Jain, punishing himself over and over. I really dug how this defied convention and wasn't the 'lost man finds purpose in being a father' cliché that the initial advertising made it out to be.

every time I explain the movie to people, I end up describing something that's not on screen. Yet the trailers emphasize the Affleck-Hedges relationship.

Don't remember thinking much of You Can Count On Me tbh. But now I feel like revisiting.

i think Lucas Hedges' "homework" gamesmanship could've been trimmed a little. Good performance though.

The central message of Lonergan's film work is "People don't change," which is refreshing.

directorial "nice parenting!" cameo made me chuckle

but his buddy Broderick's appearances are growing a little more strained

hmmm, i think Anna Paquin changes

The central message of Lonergan's film work is "People don't change for the better," which is refreshing.

Slightly modded.

i was glad the climactic spelling-out didn't get more explicit than Lee's four words to his nephew.

the Broderick scene doesn't quite work, agreed, but it's hard for me to criticize a director infatuated with creating fully inhabited worlds.

just saw Hedges in moonrise kingdom the other day.

oh was he the kid on the motorcycle?

no one of the boy scouts

One of Patrick's girlfriends was the main girl in Moonrise Kingdom.

I liked this, especially the wintry city images. But the plot was severely overdone. That family must be the unluckiest family in the world, what with all the unrelated tragedies piling up. The same problem was there with You Can Count on Me - but there it all stemmed from their parents death - and in Margaret - where, um, I guess it was a metaphor for the Bush years? It's as if Lonergan writes his movies a bit too much. Still, my favorite of his, I think.

You Can Count on Me for me--the brother/sister relationship was closes to my own life.

"closest"

all the unrelated tragedies piling up

"all the" = er, two?

Three. The alcoholic wife/mother as well.

That's not a tragedy -- that's commonplace.

yep

Of course it's a tragedy. Commonplace things can be tragedies. Combine it with the other two, and it's getting kinda ridiculous.

well, in the tabloid sense of the word. Horrible things aren't necessarily tragedies.

#wellactually 'tragedy' comes from the word 'tragos', meaning goat, and 'oide', meaning song, so unless a singing goat is somehow involved it's not a 'real' tragedy anyways.

The Greeks knew.

all the unrelated tragedies piling up

this didn't occur to me at all. the two non-central "tragedies" you're talking about seem commonplace and ordinary... plenty of families experience worse.

yeah it's not really a stretch at all

I'll respectfully disagree with Fred. MBTS, flaws and all, concerns itself with the kind of numbing banal bad news that I read in the paper every week.

Of course it happens every day, but to the same two brothers?

also heart failure is like literally the most common cause of death iirc

and also if you really don't know anyone who has experienced two (or more!) awful tragedies in life then...I guess you inhabit a charmed circle

It's not just heart failure. We're told it's a very rare heart disease that he has been living with for years. And then his brother... And his ex-wife...

But sure, if I'm the only one who doesn't know anyone who has killed three of his own kids, then I guess I do inhabit a charmed circle.

yeah that's definitely what I meant

Of course it's a tragedy. Commonplace things can be tragedies. Combine it with the other two, and it's getting kinda ridiculous.

I haven't seen this yet, but this criticism squares with how I felt about Margaret. Like the amount of Bad Things doled out to the characters was almost farcical.

Yeah, it's a thing with Lonergan, and many filmmakers who begin as writers as well. But with his earlier films, I feel it did fit with the themes of the films. Here, it's not really needed. It's kinda weird, but because the wintry town of the films title works so well as a both real and metaphorical place, the way the plot works takes away from rather than enhances the film, imo. The imagery is greater than usual with Lonergan, so the usual affectations in his scriptwriting annoys me more. But not so much that this isn't my favorite of his.

I thought the double tragedy was both a way of suggesting that life is rarely 'fair', and that the Affleck character was born under a bad sign, a jinx, a magnet for misery and hurt. "I can't beat it" - obv the film's key line - works as both a declaration of personal failing and a dread that you can't outrun fate, bad karma, cosmic retribution.

The death of the kids was a way of separating Affleck's character from... the majority of the human race really. Throughout you saw characters who were able to open up to the nephew about parental death - it's a horrible thing but it's one that people recognise and deal with. But accidentally killing your own kids, through sheer fecklessness, that puts you so beyond the level of general empathy that it virtually cuts you off from humanity.

Watched last night and was alternately moved and annoyed. Some of it felt like watching a group of actors be actors - I especially thought Gretchen Moll was the biggest culprit and I dig Gretchen Moll - and then things would shift and you got these moments of brilliance where the editing and acting and staging hit that emotional nerve like a pro.

Felt the final scene with Williams was a letdown, though, while the last scene in the house with the nephew was lovely.

Gerwig?

aw i thought Michelle was legit in the crying scene

errr... Gretchen Mol.

Not a word during campaign season, and then not even a week later: http://wesleyanargus.com/2017/03/04/how-connor-aberle-and-the-argus-are-complicit-in-slandering-casey-affleck/

Kuchera cuts the whole thing down to size, dang:

http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/6/14827946/manchester-by-the-sea-casey-affleck-toxic-masculinity

Not a word during campaign season, and then not even a week later: http://wesleyanargus.com/2017/03/04/how-connor-aberle-and-the-argus-are-complicit-in-slandering-casey-affleck/

― Frederik B, Sunday, March 5, 2017 5:11 PM (yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Did Lonergan c&p that from somewhere in the Swans thread?

In one way, as that polygon article shows, Lonergan is the undisputed master of mixing trauma and privilege. But then I read that argus-letter, and it really doesn't seem as if he knows what privilege even is.

Kuchera cuts the whole thing down to size, dang:

http://www.polygon.com/2017/3/6/14827946/manchester-by-the-sea-casey-affleck-toxic-masculinity
― El Tomboto, Monday, March 6, 2017 3:02 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

There are a few things I don't understand about this review. There's this bit, for one: "The film tries to sell itself as a blue-collar melodrama in many ways, but anyone who has grown up actually poor will only see the relatively clean houses, the newish microwaves and functional cars."

How exactly does the film try to sell itself as a blue-collar melodrama? You'd think that the very facts that the author points to about the characters' actual financial situation, plus the fact that no one in the movie refers to themselves or anyone else as blue-collar or poor, would be taken as evidence that the film is not trying to sell itself as a blue-collar melodrama.

But this seems to be the main point: "Manchester by the Sea’s most glaring fault is that it wastes an opportunity to look at the situation critically rather than through a flat lens that seems to state that this is just how things are."

What does that mean, "look at the situation critically"? What, concretely, would that amount to? In light of the fact that the author admits that the movie is a "well-written meditation on the dangers of masculinity closing men off from their own feelings or experiences", in which the lead actor is "ably personifying everything terrifying about a culture of emotionally broken men in America", how is it insufficiently "critical"? I'm sure he's not worried that people are going to see Lee as a role model for how to deal with grief.

It all reads like a bunch of observations that could just as easily be spun as praise, but that had to be packaged as a takedown because Casey Affleck harasses women.

that's how I read it too; it was incoherent.

It's remarkably coherent - though it might be because it repeats the same point over and over and over - but whether or not you think it's a bad thing is up in the air. Lonergans shitty response to the allegations makes me think that he doesn't get privilege at all, though. And nonetheless, even if you don't agree with the conclusions, the discussion of the film in itself was enlightening.

I read it as Kuchera mostly being a dad who thinks Casey Affleck's portrayal of a dad who lost his kids is well done but the character is a wallowing, useless shit, but that's important because lots of guys are like that, but this film doesn't do a good ENOUGH job examining that in a critical light.

It's interesting to read that next to Chaw's review, where he hopes Lee is doing okay, while Kuchera seems to just assume the guy's probably gonna off himself despite his nearly inexplicable material self-sufficiency.

It reads to me more like he's fabricated some baseless reasons for passionately disliking a film that he thought was much better than he wanted it to be because of ideas he has about things other than this film.

Users of Ilx are more familiar with strawmanning than 99% of people to the point that they're probably bored with people calling it out but this review seems like a pretty good example of it.

Yes, it is a bit like he's trying to wedge a bunch of issues he's thought long and hard about since GamerGate was a thing into a review. He wants Lee Chandler to have REAL problems but instead, you know, he's just completely alienated from everyone and especially the people in the town he spent his whole life in.

Anyway one scene I keep thinking back to is the wife of the boat shop owner who comes in after Lee's left, and nothing's really happened, and she just tells her husband "I don't want him in here ever again." Ugh.

Ugh because you didn't like it? I said a bit about it upthread but it seems that this is a big theme of Lonergan's, the unsaid or "things we don't know about", it happens earlier in the film when Patricks's friends tell the coach at the rink something like "those stories are bullshit" (without us knowing what stories) and also the secretary of the headmaster of the school asking, v loadedly "thee Lee Chandler?" After Lee has phoned him.

No, "Ugh" because that's the most depressing part of the whole situation. The kid at hockey practice and the woman in the boat shop are two sides of that coin, yes.

the shitness of the Broderick scene is particularly annoying because it's unnecessary anyway. We don't need the mother to come back in and we certainly don't need her to come back in with Matthew Broderick. The mother's whereabouts could also have just been unexplained, no?

tombot otm -- that small scene captures perfectly that universal small-town thing where, esp w/r/t a former scandal, literally every person in town knows you, has an opinion on you, and you know that they know...and all of the conversation about it happens when you are not around.

god there is just so much that I love about this movie.

I'll say one thing that messed with my suspension of disbelief is that everybody's a little too good looking. One thing that impressed me about Hell or High Water was they figured out how to make Chris Pine and Ben Foster almost look like some regular jackasses who fit in with the scenery.

That waitress sure didn't think Chris P looked so ordinary.

I said almost.

what i'll forever remember from that polygon text is that having a functional car is a sign of privilege.

I know we're dealing with a completely fictional scenario here but it seems to me that calling out someone dealing with the deaths of their three children as "privelaged problems" is completely fucking gross.

otm

Well, that is a completely fictional scenario. The polygon review certainly never does so. Are you trying to explain strawmannirg to us, jed?

I read it as Kuchera mostly being a dad who thinks Casey Affleck's portrayal of a dad who lost his kids is well done but the character is a wallowing, useless shit, but that's important because lots of guys are like that, but this film doesn't do a good ENOUGH job examining that in a critical light.

"If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Kuchera's hammer must be the concept of traditional masculine virtues carried to the point that they become vices.

Yeah, the objection that occurs to me in putting a lot of weight on toxic masculinity is that accidentally killing one's kids could be enough to destroy anyone. I don't want to deny that masculinity is part of it, but Lee's inability to be reached is also explainable by the particular horror of what he did, and the fact that almost nobody else has experienced it.

Anyway, all we know for certain is that Lee failed to show growth within the timeframe of the movie, the period in which we the audience demand resolution. He also failed to rise up to the precise resolution arranged for him by the circumstances of the movie. I don't know how much to conclude from that. We can't conclude that he'll never be able to move on.

but this cautious version of conservatism is one whose appeal I feel I understand a little better (and understand why it would appeal to people who aren't all that privileged in the grand scheme of things, i.e. they are the ones who will likely be at the sharp end if the ambitious plans to reshape society end in failure, so better to preserve what little you already have?)

wrong thread, sorry

IS IT?

came here to talk about the Polygon article linked earlier. i do think he goes a little too far with his "SJW agenda" (if we must go there) but he did nail some feelings I had about the film as i was watching it. bear in mind i think the movie is great, affleck's performance was phenomenal, but as a non-white dude as well I had to notice certain things...

Would have worked better as an Andre Dubus short story.

It was good but re: Morbs first post about Williams/Affleck, I felt that way about them and Coach Taylor throughout the movie (and sober mom/stepdad). Thought the kid was great, though. The scenes with him felt the most real.

Anyone else agree with me that this would have played better with all of the flashbacks cut out?

As I said when commenting on it over on the Margaret thread, I liked this just fine, but much less so than Lonergan's other two. I watched it, Moonlight and Arrival all within a week of each other, and I am most surprised that it is this film that I find myself thinking about the least of those three.

haven't seen Moonlight but Arrival was pretty damn great and thoughtful, i wouldn't even consider it a slight on Manchester

I liked this just fine, but much less so than Lonergan's other two.

Same here. And I too would have prefered a story without the flashbacks.

The big flashback, I could have done without, but I really liked those flashes back to happy days on the boat.

Yeah, I think the film could have opened with the flashback to the scene on the boat (like it already does) before just heading into the present and staying there.

Finally saw this. Really enjoyed it overall. The only thing that really bothered me was the soundtrack choices in some of the scenes. Was that where the "too much Handel" comment from the OP comes from? Thought the music during the Big Tragic Scene was way to on-the-nose with what was shown on screen. If you've earned it as a filmmaker you don't need to hammer it home with the soundtrack.

Really great. Williams' "you can't just die" pulled the rug out from under me, Lonergan's facility with *short* lines punctuating the big buildups is a rare skill imo.

Good discussions above, mainly, also think it's worth contrasting older brother's handling of a very different death in very different circumstances with affleck's. Everything has been provided for. Son is quite clearly well prepared and his matter of factness is consistently underlined as a problem for affleck's, but not explicitly called out.

Even affleck's character being left as guardian, the only disruption introduced by his brother's death, could easily enough be interpreted as a planned last effort to bring Lee home, to face the town again, to be forced into human contact again- maybe particularly in light of williams' character having stayed in touch before his death.

Matt's reading above is really well observed too.

yeah I kind of read the older brother's plans the same way, as a way of preventing Afflect's total disconnection

KL has written a TV adap of Howards End, now in production.

http://www.indiewire.com/2017/07/howards-end-photos-kenneth-lonergan-hayley-atwell-starz-1201861287/

People don't come back to this much then? Is it because 'reasons', or.. something to do with the actual film?

Life's too short.

It's a good film with great moments.

If I want to see a Sad White Man on screen, I’ll just use my phone’s selfie camera.

not cute enough

havent gone back because that one scene kicked my ass tbh

this was a very decent film. pace cryptosicko above this was much more memorable to me than arrival or moonlight

xp that scene did me in too