By Susan Granger
Special to WestportNow
“Guilt is a tireless horse. Grief ages into sorrow and sorrow is an enduring rider,” wrote Dean Koontz – a quote which perfectly describes the tone of Kenneth Lonergan’s “Manchester by the Sea.”
Even before this story begins, Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) has suffered unimaginable tragedy. Now his beloved older brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), a Cape Ann fisherman, has died, and Lee has been named guardian of Joe’s teenage son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges).
That means surly Lee, who has been working as an apartment janitor/handyman in Quincy, outside Boston, must return to his hometown of Manchester by the Sea, the working class suburb whose tight-knit residents view him as a social pariah.
While Lee wants to do right by his family, he’s reluctant to move back to a place that’s filled with painful memories and the inevitability of running into his foul-mouthed ex-wife (Michelle Williams), who has re-married and is expecting a baby.
But rebellious Patrick is determined to stay on the North Shore, where he’s a popular high school jock who plays in a band and has numerous girl-friends.
Working from his original screenplay, director Kenneth Lonergan creates a poignant American melodrama, adroitly inter-weaving complicated flashbacks with comedic moments.
Lonergan’s authenticity is undeniable: the truth is in the nuanced details, like Lee and Patrick bickering about moving to Boston while walking down the street in the freezing cold after making Joe’s funeral arrangements and forgetting where they parked the car.
“Are you fundamentally unsound?” Patrick asks his cantankerous uncle.
Casey Affleck’s minimalist self-loathing deserves an Oscar nomination, along with Michelle Williams’ wrenching supporting turn. The ensemble also includes Gretchen Mol, C.J. Wilson, Matthew Broderick and Anna Baryshnikov (Mikhail Baryshnikov’s daughter).
FYI: The $8.5 million film was originally conceived by Matt Damon and John Krasinski. But they had scheduling conflicts, and it was essential to shoot during the New England winter.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Manchester by the Sea” is a mournful 9, an unflinching, emotionally devastating tear-jerker.
With “Loving,” writer/director Jeff Nichols solemnly tackles one of the most influential Civil Rights cases of the late 1960s.
When his girlfriend Mildred (Ruth Negga) told bricklayer Richard Loving (Joel Edgerton) that she was pregnant, he drove from rural Virginia to Washington, D.C. so they could get married.
Richard was Caucasian and Mildred was African-American; interracial marriage was illegal in Virginia in 1958 under an “anti-miscegenation” statute enacted in 1924.
After they returned home, Sheriff Brooks (Marton Csokas) and his deputies burst into their bedroom to arrest them. The judge offered a one-year suspended sentence if they’d leave the state and not return for 25 years, noting:
So they moved to Washington, D.C. But Mildred hated urban living and was determined to have Richard’s midwife mother deliver their child. Which led to their second arrest.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1963 inspired Mildred to write to Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who referred their plight to the American Civil Liberties Union.
ACLU lawyers (Nick Kroll, Jon Bass) took their case to the Supreme Court, resulting in the Loving vs. Virginia decision in 1967, which struck down state laws prohibiting interracial marriage – chronicled by a Life magazine photographer (Michael Shannon) as “The Crime of Being Married.”
But unlike “Sully,” which began with the crash-landing on the Hudson River and went on to reveal “the rest of the story” – there are no dramatic disclosures that offer insight into the characters or their dilemma. Only the Lovings’ stoic patience and perseverance.
Richard was taciturn, monosyllabic, almost stone-faced, and Mildred’s shy, soft-spoken demeanor was also extraordinarily low-key. Their reserved humility drains much of the drama out of this real-life story.
On the Granger Gauge, “Loving” is a slow, sensitive, subdued 7 – timely primarily because it paved the way for the more recent controversy over same-sex marriage.
Brad Pitt once observed, “Success is a beast – and it actually puts the emphasis on the wrong thing. You get away with more instead of looking within.” That’s the problem with “Allied.”
Rumors of Brad Pitt’s romancing Marion Cotillard, which either did or didn’t precipitate his divorce from Angelina Jolie, has overwhelmed Robert Zemeckis’ old-fashioned W.W.II thriller.
Pitt plays Max Vatan, an intelligence officer from Quebec working with the British military. In 1942, he parachutes onto the Moroccan desert, making his way to Casablanca, where joins Marianne Beausejour (Cotillard) an undercover French Resistance operative who has charmed Vichy collaborationists.
Posing as husband-and-wife, they go to a party at the German Embassy, where they assassinate a high-ranking Nazi and flee to London. (This blazing guns scene is in the Coming Attractions.)
Soon after, they marry, have a baby and settle into quiet domesticity in Hampstead Heath, when they’re not dodging bombs during the Blitz. All’s well until Max is unexpectedly confronted with the RAF’s accusation that Marianne is a spy, feeding classified information to Hitler’s Berlin.
But this thriller never really ignites, stemming from Steven Knight’s stilted screenplay, and the lack of suspense that can be traced to Robert Zemeckis’ uneven, often sluggish pacing.
While Brad Pitt looks dapper in the period costumes, his performance is stiff, particularly since Marion Cotillard seems to relish her evasive character’s inherent enigma.
On the Granger Gauge, “Allied” is a stylized, superficial 6, distracting from the essential believability.
( Editor’s Note: Westport resident Susan Granger grew up in Hollywood, studied journalism with Pierre Salinger at Mills College, and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with highest honors in journalism. In addition to writing for newspapers and magazines, she has been on radio/television as an anchorwoman and movie/drama critic for many years. See her reviews at www.susangranger.com.)
