Review: Manchester By the Sea (2016)

* * * 1/2
Director: Kenneth Longergan
Starring: Casey Affleck

Life goes on, but maybe, sometimes, it doesn't. Maybe there are wounds that run so deep that they never heal and only ever become manageable. Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester By the Sea, his third feature after 2000's You Can Count on Me and 2011's Margaret, is a portrait of grief, of a man who will live the rest of his days in the psychic space left by the worst moment of his life. It's a fine film, often moving, sometimes funny, well-observed when it comes to the minutiae of relationships and of place, and filled with great performances, from its star right down to actors who only appear in a scene or two. It's everything, basically, that you expect from a movie released at this time of year. I'm not convinced, on first viewing, that it's anything more than that, a film that you admire as it burns brightly in the heat of Oscar season and then never feel compelled to revisit - but, then again, I felt that way about You Can Count On Me for a long time, too. Sometimes you have to grow a bit before you can engage a movie on its level and recognize its quiet genius, and maybe that's the case with Manchester By the Sea.

Review: Triple 9 (2016)

* * 1/2
Director: John Hillcoat
Starring: Casey Affleck, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Anthony Mackie, Woody Harrelson, Kate Winslet

Since 1995, all heist movies have existed in the long shadow of Heat, Michael Mann's defining word on the genre. Every once in a while there will be a film like The Town, which struck a deep enough chord to stand somewhat apart, but that's the exception, rather than the rule. Most of the films that have followed Heat have to be content with paling in comparison and John Hillcoat's Triple 9 is no different. A heist movie centering on dirty cops and the Russian mob, Triple 9 features a lot of really good actors playing some pretty stock characters, making for a film that's fairly entertaining most of the time, but ultimately a forgettable entry in the filmographies of all involved. Rarely has such a great cast been assembled for a such a deeply okay movie.

Review: The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford

It’s a shame that Warner Bros. released this movie with so little ceremony and let it languish and die before it could find a broader audience. This is a film that is visually and narratively stunning. A mournful elegy on a way of life that has passed and a thoughtful meditation on the nature of celebrity. It features two wonderful central performances – those of Casey Affleck as Robert Ford, and Brad Pitt as Jesse James – and is directed with admirable confidence and skill. It’s a film that will reward you if you care to seek it out.

The story begins with the last train robbery of the James gang, headed by Jesse and his older brother Frank (Sam Shepard). Bob Ford wanders into the scene, a brother of Charley (Sam Rockwell), one of the gang’s members. He insinuates himself into Jesse’s life, regarding him with a mixture of hero-worship and desire. Frank doesn’t like Bob and later, when Jesse brings Bob home to stay, you get the feeling that Zee James (Mary-Louise Parker) is unsettled by him as well. Eventually, as the title reveals, Bob will slay Jesse, but that’s not where the movie ends. It goes beyond that to examine what it means that Jesse James has been murdered and examines how a criminal who killed people in cold blood became part of the romantic myth of the American west.

Andrew Dominik, who both wrote and directed the film, lets the story unfold slowly. We know where the story is going, but it takes its time getting there, letting us get to know the members of the James gang and get a feel for their relationships and for the surrounding landscape. The landscape becomes another character, sometimes flat and seeming to crush the characters between earth and sky, and always wide-open. Characters appear as specs on the horizon and ride in to focus in a number of beautiful shots. From a purely visual standpoint, my favourite shot is at the beginning, when train the gang is going to rob comes to an abrupt stop in the darkness and Jesse is bathed in the steam from the engine. Throughout the film, Jesse appears to us as if through a mist – the mist of Bob’s mind and the mist of history. There are scenes of voice-over narration over top of images that are just slightly blurry, as if we are watching re-enactments from a historical documentary. Jesse is always at a distance from us – what we know we learn through the voice-over’s flat, matter-of-fact narration, and Bob’s own perspective as he and Jesse dance closer to their destinies.

The moment of truth is fascinating as Jesse, weary and increasingly unstable emotionally, more or less invites Bob to murder him. He removes his guns and places them slowly on his couch for Bob to see, then walks across the room to clean the dust off a photo. In its reflection he sees Bob and allows himself to be shot. For Bob, too, this is treated as something inevitable. After he shoots Jesse, he collapses on the couch, his act having taken everything out of him. You don’t get the feeling that he wanted to kill Jesse as much as he recognized that he must, just as much as Jesse recognized that he had to let him.

As Bob, Casey Affleck runs a gauntlet of character development. We meet him first as an awkward 19-year-old who idolizes the famous outlaw. He wants to be Jesse James. Failing that, he wants to be with Jesse James, as the latent undertone of numerous scenes suggest. Failing that, he must kill Jesse James. Following the murder, for which he’s never charged due to a deal made with the Governor, Bob capitalizes on his own new-found fame, appearing before packed houses for the staging of re-enactments of the murder with Charley playing Jesse. Eventually, he himself is assassinated and he seems to accept it as easily as Jesse did.

The way the film deals with the assassination and its aftermath comments strongly on the nature of celebrity culture. Jesse’s corpse is displayed for the public, photographed, made in to a sideshow much to Zee’s horror. Bob is reviled for having murdered him even though the public flocks to his show, eagerly to see him recreate the murder for them, and even though Jesse murdered a number of people in cold blood. Bob dreams of visiting the families of those people, whom he imagines would thank him for having killed the outlaw. But the bad things Jesse did cease to matter with his death - he becomes a myth, a figure of romance. People pay to tour the homes where he lived, they buy pictures of his corpse, write songs about him, name their children after him. “You’re gonna break a lot of hearts,” Jesse tells Bob. And he does.

Review: Gone, Baby, Gone

As a fan of both the source novel and of Ben Affleck, I’ll admit that I went into this with my fingers crossed, just hoping that it didn’t get screwed up. It doesn’t; this is a great adaptation. It departs somewhat from the novel – the novel is the fourth in a series and in it Patrick Kenzie and Angie Genaro are seasoned pros; here they’re new to the game and their experience so far has been limited to looking for people who’ve skipped out on their creditors – but it gets the essence of the story just right. This is a film that is very comfortable with its place and with the people in it, and we come to know the rhythm of the city and the way that these people get around in it.


The plot: 4 year old Amanda McCready is kidnapped in the middle of the night. Her aunt (Amy Madigan) doesn’t think the police are doing enough to find her, so she hires Patrick (Casey Affleck) and Angie (Michelle Monaghan) to do some extra leg work. Pretty soon Patrick and Angie (mostly Patrick – I’ll get to that momentarily) are figuring out that things don’t exactly add up, drawing themselves into the line of fire and, ultimately, a moral conundrum.

The characters are tightly drawn and the performances are uniformly good, especially those of Amy Ryan and Ed Harris. Ryan is pitch perfect as the coked up mother of the kidnapped girl; if you’ve read the novel, you’ll think she walked right off the page and into the movie. Harris, playing the lead investigator who alternates between anger at Patrick for getting in his way, and admiration for Patrick’s ability, is very effective as the skewed moral compass of this dark and scary world. Together these two characters make a pretty effective argument for doing the wrongs things for the right reasons.

I only have two real qualms with the film, which is on the whole a solid effort by Affleck as both writer and director. First, the character of Angie. In the novels, she’s a force to be reckoned with, a tough talking ass kicker. In the film her presence is so far diminished that she barely registers. The character essentially exists to offer Patrick comfort when things look bleak and to act as a sounding board for his thoughts and theories. Admittedly the novels, like the movie, are told from Patrick’s point of view, but at least in the novels one didn’t get the sense that Angie was just along for the ride. She was always in the thick of things, starting as much trouble as Patrick does.

The other problem is the use of flashbacks, the style of which seems to have been ripped off from CSI. It is a complicated plot, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the audience needs to be reminded of something that happened five minutes ago in order to follow, and the flashbacks to things we hadn’t already seen could have been dealt with in a more effective way. As it is, they took me right out of the movie due largely to the aforementioned similarity to the CSI style of storytelling.

But these are minor problems in a movie that is overall very good. It’s well paced and suspenseful, even if you’re familiar with the book. Come Oscar time, the performance by Ryan and the screenplay by Affleck and Aaron Stockard will hopefully be remembered and rightly honoured.