Friday, December 23, 2016

Theater Whore: Manchester By The Sea


Manchester By The Sea 9/10

This will have some spoilers. Last night Cam and I went to see the movie Manchester By The Sea. I wasn't quite sure what this movie was even about but I like some of the cast fine so I wasn't opposed to checking it out. We went to the Arclight over in Culver City which was the first time for me at that location. Its not close to as well set up as the one over on Sunset but its ten times better than The Grove. That place is the devil. This movie is about a guy in Boston named Lee Chandler played by Casey Affleck. He is a janitor for multiple apartments and just goes about his day cleaning up and fixing folks shit. One night he gets hammered at a bar before getting into a brawl.


One day he gets a call that his brother Joe played by Kyle Chandler is in the hospital after having a heart attack. He struggles to get there in traffic but by the time he gets there his brother is dead. This is where I got sad as fuck because this is exactly what happened to me fourteen years ago when my brother died. There is a lot of awkwardness as people try to console him and he tries to figure out what it is you even do when someone dies so suddenly. Lee decides to go and tell Joe's son Patrick played by Lucas Hedges that his father is dead.


This movie goes back and forth between the present and the past and shows you why people react to each other the way they do and its done really well. When you see Lee as a janitor and then suddenly you find out that he was happily married with two young daughters and a baby you wonder just what the fuck happened to this guy. They don't immediately tell you so when they do it is fucking horrible. I won't say what happened but when you see it it'll break your heart. I say this to explain why it is such a big deal when Lee and his ex wife Randi played by Michelle Williams. She gives him a call after hearing about Joe's death.


Lee finds out that he has been left in charge of Joe's son Patrick after a will reading. He has no desire to have this responsibility. He asks why Joe even did this and the lawyer assumes that he had spoken to Lee about this. Lee wants to pawn him off to a friend of the family because he knows that Patrick's mother can not take the kid. You see in flashbacks why not and apparently she got worse at some point. Patrick disagrees because he says she has changed after revealing that he has been in touch with her for the past year through email.

I had no idea that this movie was going to be as great as it was. It didn't have explosions or a super complicated murder mystery aspect to it. It was a well directed, written, and acted film. I can't even point to one particular actor or actress because everyone was so damned good. It didn't feel fake. I know that sounds weird when talking about a movie but sometimes when I watch a movie something will happen that will yank me out of it. As sad as the subject matter in this movie is there are quite a few moments that will make you laugh or smile unexpectedly. This was one of my favorite movies this year in a year filled with terrible films.

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