“Manchester by the Sea” is one of the year’s best films. If you want to know why, read on. If not, go buy a ticket now. You won’t be disappointed.
Casey Affleck, in what is sure to be an Oscar nominated performance, is Lee Chandler, a Boston janitor with the hollow-eyed look of a man whose life has been touched by tragedy. As a maintenance man in an apartment block he spends the day with odd jobs, unplugging toilets and doing illegal electrical work. At night he picks bar fights. When his brother older Joe (Kyle Chandler) dies suddenly of a heart attack, Lee must return home to Manchester, Massachusetts and settle the estate. Haunted by ghosts of his past, Lee’s hometown brings back difficult memories. His pregnant ex-wife Randi (Michelle Williams) appears to have stated her life anew and the tragedy that scarred him reverberates through the place and its people. When he finds out Joe named him guardian of Patrick (Lucas Hedges), a headstrong teen with a way with a joke and the local girls, the life he has tried so desperately to numb becomes complicated further.
“Manchester by the Sea” is many things. As a finely acted look at grief and the aftermath of heartbreak, it has few peers among this year’s crop of films. But it’s also very a funny odd couple/buddy flick that isn’t afraid to flip flop between drama and comedy. This is writer/director Kenneth Lonergan’s tempest in a teapot, a smallish film that roils with big emotional moments.
Affleck is the core of the film. He’s in virtually every frame and while understated he bristles with feeling. It is a tremendous performance that never fails into morbidity as he skilfully keeps he character alive, both physically and metaphysically. Every day is a struggle for Lee and he deals with his trauma the only way he knows how, with blistering honesty and by drinking and fighting to feel something. There is emotional truth in every mumbled line and come Oscar season expect to hear a lot about this performance.
Affleck shares several scenes with Michelle Williams, but one in particular stands out. For most of the film we only see her in flashbacks, when she was married to Lee. Cut to present day and a chance encounter on the street. In a master class of acting the two rehash and come to grips with the trauma that tore them apart. It heartbreak laid bare and it is a stunning scene.
Also strong and crucial to the film’s dynamic is Lucas Hedges as Joe’s son, Lee’s nephew. He’s a chip off the Chandler block, raw, rough and honest to a fault (except when it comes to the girls he dates). It’s a remarkably mature performance that never loses sight that Patrick is an inexperienced minor with much to learn.
I fear I’ve made “Manchester by the Sea” by the sea sound like an exercise in Sturm und Drang but it’s not. It deals with very real, very difficult human situations but does so with honesty and a great deal of unexpected humour and wisdom.
Those only familiar with Holliday Grainger from her high profile appearance as the 1930s gangster Bonnie Parker in the much-hyped A&E miniseries Bonnie & Clyde could be forgiven for thinking she was born and raised on American soil. A perfect Texas drawl disguised her natural English accent.
“I’m from Manchester,” she said in our recent sit down, “northwest England.”
“Home of the Stone Roses,” I replied, mentioning the Mancunian hit makers of Love Spreads.
“I’m a bit too young for that but it’s a small town so the Stone Roses are never too far away,” she replied with a wicked laugh.
This weekend the twenty-seven year old brings a new accent to the maritime drama The Finest Hours. She plays Massachusetts native Miriam, a bride-to-be anxiously awaiting the return of her Coast Guard fiancée (Chris Pine) from a life and death mission during a brutal New England nor’easter.
“I think I’m quite good at adopting accents,” she says. “Once I started the Bonnie and Clyde Texas accent it was very easy. Within a day I was speaking in the accent all the time and I found it quite comfortable.”
She was so secure with the twang she’d often keep the accent going even when not on camera. The Finest Hours presented more of a challenge.
“I found this much harder. I actually stayed in my own accent on set for the first week or two because I didn’t feel comfortable enough in the accent to stay in it.”
To master the 1950s coastal Massachusetts brogue she worked with a dialect coach and tried, unsuccessfully, to get some real life input.
“I went to Chatham (Massachusetts] and spent an afternoon trying to record people but Chatham is now so affluent and touristy. I was going into bars and restaurants and talking to people. ‘Where are you from? Oh, you’re from New York. You’ve just moved here. Which pubs have young girls working in them who are from around here?’ I’d go and record some of them and they’d sound like they were from bloody Manhattan. Like bloody Valley Girls or something. It was not like the 1950s accent I needed to hear.”
Her character’s real life daughter Patty ended up helping out, introducing Grainger to a contemporary of Miriam’s who “had the right way of talking. The resonance.”
The actress nailed the New England burr and then refined it during production.
“In the middle of shooting the producers would say, ‘It’s too strong, bring it back.’ In my mind [I was thinking] has she been at work where she speaks quite well or is she angry? It’s fluid. People change their accents all the time.”
Ironically after all that work it’s likely Miriam didn’t have the usual regional accent.
“In actual fact Miriam’s first language wasn’t even English,” says Grainger, who will next be seen starring opposite Alicia Vikander and Judi Dench in Tulip Fever. “She was brought up speaking Finnish so she didn’t actually have the traditional accent but for the purposes of our movie we’re not going to play around with that. It’s too complicated.”
As for her own Mancunian lilt, don’t expect to hear it every time she opens her mouth.
“I change my accent all the time depending on whom I’m talking too,” she says. “If anyone had to characterise me they’d be bloody lost.”
THE FINEST HOURS SIDEBAR WITH JODY THOMAS, CANADIAN COAST GUARD COMMISSIONER
“We work very closely with the American Coast Guard, there is no mile of our coast line that we don’t share along the lower parallel. We do the same work they do. I’m watching them but I could be watching my own people. I feel enormous pride in what a Coast Guard does. To have a movie like this produced that talks about the kind of work we do, even if it’s not the Canadian Coast Guard is quite extraordinary.”
A new movie based on the book “The Finest Hours: The True Story Behind the US Coast Guard’s Most Daring Rescue,” is the kind of thriller that tries to get the audience excited by constantly reminding them that what we’re seeing is impossible.
“There’s no way they can get over that sandbar!” “This [insert hopeless situation] is a hopeless situation!” “We’ll never make it back to shore!”
Of course in this tale of greatest generation gumption most everything is going to work out well and that lack of any real stakes sucks much of the tension out of “The Finest Hours.”
Set in 1952 against the backdrop of a brutal New England nor’easter, the action begins when an oil tanker is ripped in half, stranding thirty soldiers in a floating coffin. As it fills with water their chances of survival reduce by the minute. On board engineer Ray Sybert (Casey Affleck) makes desperate attempts to stay afloat, hoping against hope that someone will brave the vicious 70-foot waves to rescue them.
Luckily for them a four-man Coast Guard crew led by Boatswains Mate First Class Bernie Webber (Chris Pine along with Ben Foster, John Magaro and Kyle Gallner) in a small motor lifeboat CG 36500 are willing to brave the waves and bring the men back home.
The bulk of the film takes place on the water—imagine the H2O budget!—but while the men are battling the elements their families—most notably Bernie’s fiancée Miriam (Holliday Granger)—anxiously await the return of their loved ones from the grip of the storm.
“The Finest Hours” is a big, handsome movie with stern jawed heroes and plucky dames. It’s a story about the men who go to sea in ships, weather bombs and Hollywood heroism. It’s also a tad dull. Director Craig Gillespie doesn’t skimp on the action—there are waves a plenty—and the men are thrown into one precarious situation after the next but beyond the most cursory character work it never feels like a great deal of thought was put into the people populating the screen. Pine turns Bernie into a shy, insecure man who finds his heroic side but the charisma the actor usually brings to his roles is missing. The other actors hand in competent performances but the characters are so underwritten it feels as if they stumbled out of Central Casting before Gillespie shanghaied them for this film.
With few compelling characters the movie drifts along, hoping to reel you in with big, splashy (literally) visuals, but it’s all for naught. Filling the screen with action might entertain the eye but if you don’t care about the characters, how can you care about the action?
“The Finest Hours” has its heart in the right place but is sunk by earnestness and mannered presentation.
In the future when dictionaries have been replaced by computerized data banks surgically implanted in our fingertips the entry for “bleak” will be excerpts from “Out of the Furnace.”
Christian Bale stars as Russell Baze, a steel mill worker in America’s economically depressed Rust Belt. After doing time for vehicular manslaughter he emerges from jail to find his live-in girlfriend (Zoe Saldana) no longer lives in and his Iraq war vet brother Rodney (Casey Affleck) having trouble with civilian life.
Rodney is a tough guy. How tough? “Four tours in Iraq tough,” says John Petty (Willem Dafoe), a low level gangster who also acts as Rodney’s manager in the bare- knuckle fight game.
As Russell tries to rebuild his life he is pushed to extremes when Rodney gets mixed up with Harlan DeGroat (Woody Harrelson), a vicious hillbilly meth dealer who is so backwoods he drinks moonshine out of a mason jar. After someone asks him, “Do you have a problem with me?” he replies, “I got a problem with everybody.”
When Rodney goes missing after a fight run by DeGroat, Russell takes the law into his own hands to exact some vigilante justice.
The vengeance angle sounds Batmanesque but there isn’t a cowl or a cape in sight in “Out of the Furnace.” Instead this is a deliberately paced family drama that spends most of its running time setting up the circumstances that lead to the revenge angle.
“Crazy Heart” director Scott Cooper packs more bleakness in here than the most mournful George Jones song. Bad things happen to good people, hearts break and innocence is thrown out with the trash. It’s a portrait of a hard life drawn in hard edged detail, with no relief for the characters or for us.
Bale and Affleck are believable as brothers and hand in suitably intense performances but Harrelson is the most memorable character. Is there a better scuzzball in mainstream movies than Woody? He’s a menacing presence, twitchy and unpredictable with the worst teeth this side of the Appalachians.
Cooper hangs these fine performances on a framework so grim it’s hard to see what the point of the film is other than making audiences want to open a vein as the final credits roll. For all its pluses—the depiction of the treatment of soldiers coming home from war mixed with its take on family love and loyalty—and its singularity of director Cooper’s uncompromising vision, “Out of the Furnace” is so focused on the dark you almost want to play it in reverse. Like the old joke goes: What do you get when you play a country song backwards? You get your house back, get your wife back…
The intense actor, who became a superstar playing Batman, makes chancy career choices on purpose.
“I like to think that as long as you continue choosing diverse roles, you can avoid becoming predictable,” he says.
He could make a life (and a fortune) playing square-jawed superheroes in action movies, but instead chooses to shake things up. Since his breakthrough performance in 1987’s Empire of the Sun he has been a chameleon, losing sixty pounds to play the skeletal lead in The Machinist and gaining a beer gut and a comb over for an upcoming role in American Hustle.
This weekend in Out of the Furnace he changes it up once again. He stars as a steel mill worker pushed to extremes when his Iraq war veteran brother (Casey Affleck) gets mixed up with the wrong people and disappears.
The vengeance angle sounds Batmanesque but Out of the Furnace is set far away from Gotham in the economically-depressed Rust Belt but there isn’t a cowl or a cape in sight and Bale has once again physically transformed himself.
Here’s a look at how Bale physically changes it up for his movie roles.
Creating the “Olympian physique” of serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho took some discipline. “I’m English,” he said, “and in England, we don’t have many gyms around. We’d rather go to a pub instead.” A trainer and a protein diet took off the pounds.
As boxer and former drug addict Dicky Ecklund in The Fighter he dropped thirty pounds and used make-up and prosthetics to age himself. How did he lose the weight? “Usually I always say, ‘Oh, I do a lot of coke whenever I lose weight.’ I’m not sure if it’s so funny for this movie, to say that.” In reality he trained with the real-life Ecklund and boxed the pounds off.
In Velvet Goldmine he plays a London journalist looking into the life and faked death of glam rock singer Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers). Once again he had to physically transform, but not in the traditional way.
When his mom saw that he was working out and running at 6 am she said, “Christian, what are you doing? You’re doing a film about sex drugs and rock and roll. Why don’t you do it the way they did it? They weren’t out running. They drank a helluva lot and lived unhealthily.”
“I’m Still Here,” the pseudo cinéma vérité documenting Joaquin Phoenix’s shift from actor to rap star isn’t a documentary but an elaborate piece of performance art. Directed by Casey Affleck—Phoenix’s brother-in-law—it purports to be a chronicle of a complicated artist who feels “stuck in a prison of self imposed characterization.” Along the way we see Phoenix snort cocaine, yell, mumble and chase down Sean Combs while slowly turning into a bearded, tubby Zach Galifianakis look-a-like and singing the worst hip hop since Vanilla Ice rocked the mic. Part of me wishes this wasn’t a hoax because if it really was a portrait of a man in collapse I could excuse the sloppy, self indulgent filmmaking. What could have been an exploration of fame and insecurity is instead a one joke sideshow stretched to an hour-forty-five. It feels like being the only sober person at a party full of drunk and high people. They are, of course, more entertained by the goings on than you are. I do give Affleck and Phoenix points for commitment, but commitment doesn’t make a good movie.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (hereafter known simply as TAJJBTCRF) is a beautifully ponderous revitalization of one of the screen’s most popular genres. It is a western, complete with six shooters, saloons and horses, but it has more to do with the elegiac westerns of the 1970s, movies like McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Heaven’s Gate than the recently released and action heavy 3:10 to Yuma.
TAJJBTCRF takes its time with the story of Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), the man whose obsession with fabled outlaw Jesse James (Brad Pitt) led to disillusionment, fear and ultimately the assassination referred to in the title. At 2 hours and 40 minutes TAJJBTCRF may seem overlong for the casual viewer, but the unhurried pace of the piece reveals many charms for those patient enough to sit through the whole thing.
Quiet and lyrical the movie is art house all the way. Beautifully photographed (on locations in Manitoba and Alberta) TAJJBTCRF focuses on character rather than action, trying to get a grip on why Ford shot James, not how. Through the intimate performances and narration we are given insight into the character’s motivations in a way that is usually absent from films featuring strong silent types.
Pitt shines as the conflicted Jesse James, a charismatic rebel who seems to come unwound as the film goes on, but it is the performance of Casey Affleck that steals the show. His sleepy-eyed take on Robert Ford, rife with a mix of insecurity and swagger is a star-making turn.
From the autumnal hues of the cinematography to the mournful soundtrack everything about TAJJBTCRF played in a minor chord, but despite the film’s hushed tone it quietly bristles with a sense of adventure and daring all too rare in mainstream film.
