Manchester by the Sea is simply magnificent

Casey Affleck

In Manchester by the Sea, Casey Affleck plays a man called Lee Chandler, although he is usually referred to – and normally behind his back – as ‘the Lee Chandler’. He is, it has to be said, a man with deep and serious issues.

We meet him first in the deadest of dead end jobs as a janitor in a low-rent housing complex. He can barely be civil to his tenants and eventually the anger erupts. Lee is a powder keg of rage with the shortest of fuses. However when his brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) dies suddenly Lee is called back to the family home in the titular town. Joe’s death was not unexpected so he has made some provision, chief among them being that Lee should look after his teenage son Patrick (Lance Hedges).

It may be that Joe was well aware of Lee’s issues and left him in charge of Patrick in the hope of enabling him to deal with them. But everyone, Lee included, knows that makes no sense, and the film rather revels in that. One of the surprises of the film up to this point is how light it has been given the subject matter. Lonergan is a gifted comic writer – he wrote Analyse This (1999) – and the lightness of touch amid the scenes of grief make the whole experience more credible.

However in the moment where Lee sits down to decide whether he is going to accept his brother’s wishes, the film takes a turn. We discover just why he is known as ‘the Lee Chander’ in a sequence of devastating emotional power; a scene so raw and painful it’s like sandpaper being rubbed on a nerve.

Suddenly Affleck’s characterisation makes sense; everything clicks into place in a performance of superb self-control and restraint. Lee doesn’t just have anger issues; he is in the deepest circle of his own private hell, the one reserved for those who have committed the most unforgivable sins. Ironically there are those who are prepared to forgive him but he is not among them.

It is to Lonergan’s credit that he is able to handle this big reveal without derailing the film. Lee and Patrick find themselves in the worst places of their life and the scary thing is that they are each other’s best chance of redemption. Bravely Lonergan focuses on the humour, albeit humour of the darkest shade of black, to keep the film going. The ongoing debate about where Joe should be buried, for example, is just an elongated double act.

Lonergan’s screenplay is tone-perfect and the performances throughout are faultless. Casey Affleck is simply magnificent; you don’t feel sorry for Lee for his faults, you are just astonished that he manages to bear the burden of his anguish on a daily basis. Affleck never once begs for the audience’s sympathy, he doesn’t allow himself a single unearned emotion in this film. It is, for me, one of the great performances of 21^st century American cinema.

He is not alone. Lance Hedges is excellent as young Patrick, while Kyle Chandler and Michelle Williams are remarkably effective with limited screen time.

I confess that I have always been fonder of Kenneth Lonergan as a writer than a director. I like his screenplays for Analyse This and Gangs of New York (2002), however his two previous films as writer-director, You Can Count on Me (2000) and Margaret (2011) left me rather cold.

Death or the prospect of it rather haunted those two films but with Manchester by the Sea, the grim reaper comes front and centre as Lonergan embraces mortality and its consequences. But he does so with humanity and optimism to create a film about grief and grieving which, especially in the last two scenes, finds a haunting beauty in our ability to survive and move on.

Not so much La La Land as Blah Blah Bland

Stone and Gosling perform A Lovely Night

The movie musical is Hollywood’s gift to the world. It is studio film making at its best, the absolute zenith of what some decry peevishly as ‘industrial film making’. The Hollywood studio musical is the perfect marriage of form and comment to create a product which, at its best, is genuinely transcendent.

The studio most associated with the musical is MGM and in the hands of geniuses – and I do not use the word lightly – such as Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, Vincente Minnelli, Arthur Freed, and Stanley Donen – they elevated the genre to cinematic art. I accept that Astaire’s best work was possibly done in his formative years at RKO but it was MGM that provided a huge canvas to display his incomparable talent.

Films such as Easter Parade (1948), Show Boat (1951), Kiss Me Kate (1953), and, of course, Singin’ in the Rain (1952) were glorious celebrations of song and dance. These were extravagant, vivacious, larger than life experiences guaranteed to lift the gloomiest of spirits. It’s no coincidence that the first golden age of the movie musical emerges at the height of the Great Depression; the joy of the musical provided some communal relief from the misery of the real world.

This lengthy preamble is by way of providing context for my disappointment with La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s attempt to recreate the musical for the modern era. For me, the film is ridiculously overpraised and reminds me of Dr Johnson’s famous quote about dogs walking on their hind legs; it’s not done especially well but it is a miracle that it is done at all.

La La Land is a location musical set against the backdrop of modern Hollywood with a backward glance to the golden era. It’s the story of two young people, Mia (Emma Stone), a wannabe actress, and Sebastian (Ryan Gosling), a jazz musician who wants to follow his dream and open his own musically pure jazz club. The film charts the journey of their relationship as the success they crave threatens to tear them apart.

All of this is done to the accompaniment of, if I’m honest, a fairly modest selection of songs and some unimaginative dance numbers. The big set piece opening number Another Day of Sun sets the tone, it’s an uninspired routine on a gridlocked motorway fly over which for all its efforts lacks the energy and joie de vivre you might expect from  a number like this. Director Damien Chazelle apparently fretted over where this piece should fit in the film and it shows; it doesn’t work where it is and I’m not sure it would work anywhere.

I think part of the problem is that generally we have forgotten how to make movies like this. I’m certain, for example, that there are one or two dancers in this number who can be seen waiting for their cue and looking straight into the camera. We no longer have the grace or elegance that characterised the work of say Stanley Donen or Jacques Demy. I mention Demy because this seems to owe more to his work than it does the big studio musicals.

Chazelle seems to me to be channelling Demy, the narrative structure comes from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and the colour palette from Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967); both magnificent pieces which manage to be inspired by an original while at times surpassing it. La La Land for me doesn’t even come close, it’s a knock-off of a tribute act, at best a second generation copy.

There is a general lack of performance from Stone and Gosling. They are both fine actors but here the people they play are insipid and characterless. This is a musical which, in defiance of convention, actually manages to be smaller than life. No matter how you dress it up they can’t sing or dance so there is no performative voice. I’m not interested in whether or not Gosling learned to play the piano for this film; I’m told he did but don’t necessarily believe it. What I want is for him to look as if he can play the piano and, more important, look as if he’s enjoying it.

The same goes for the dancing. I don’t want to see Emma Stone slip out of heels and into pumps before the start of the dance number, A Lovely Night. For one thing it reminds me I’m watching a movie which I don’t want to happen, and specifically it reminds me that Ginger Rogers did all of this much better while, in her own words, ‘going backwards and in heels’.

Mia and Sebastian are insipid and characterless. Even if Stone and Gosling weren’t so preoccupied with singing and dancing the script gives them nothing to play; the characters, like their singing, are strictly one note. I don’t often do this but to see how you can bring genuine emotion and musical craft to a romantic sequence look at this heartbreaker from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg featuring Catherine Deneuve and Nino Castelnuovo.

In the end La La Land isn’t an especially bad film, it’s just a bit ordinary. We haven’t seen anything like this for a while so we think it’s better than it is, but I can’t see it lingering long in the cinematic annals.

Scorsese's silence speaks volumes

Apostasy is the abandoning or renunciation of a belief, usually religious. It is the key theme of Martin Scorsese’s magnificent if flawed Silence, which is set against the backdrop of the European drive to convert 17^th century Japan to Catholicism.

Japan is persecuting Catholics and the Church is withdrawing its missionaries. Nonetheless Father Rodrigues (Andrew Garfield) and Father Garrpe (Adam Driver) are Jesuit priests who beg to be sent into hostile Japan to find news of their mentor Father Ferreira (Liam Neeson).  

Ferriera, it is alleged, has apostatised; that is, he has renounced his Catholic faith and converted to Buddhism. Rodrigues and Garrpe cannot believe this of their mentor; if his faith is questioned then so by extension is theirs. They ask for permission to go into Japan, in secret, to find Ferriera and, in the process, propagate the faith.

This is a passion project for Scorsese. He has been trying to film Shusaku Endo’s novel for 30 years and has always been able to put it off. In some respects, I might argue that the reason for this is that Scorsese himself is something of an apostate.

His superb early career is benchmarked by a series of films dealing with sin and redemption; even from his breakthrough movie Mean Streets which was categorised by a Jesuit friend of the director as ‘too much Good Friday and not enough Easter Sunday’. This period in his career largely ended with Raging Bull (1980) although there is the obvious outlier in the shape of The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), which was itself about the attraction of apostasy. Since then Scorsese’s films have been good but largely empty; they seemed to be technical exercises in pursuit of an Oscar which eventually came to him for The Departed (2006). There is no doubt that few directors have been more deserving of an Oscar than Scorsese, but it is equally certain that The Departed can’t hold a candle to his earlier, overlooked work. Now with Silence, which was due to be his next film after Last Temptation, Scorsese seems to have rediscovered his faith and with it his passion. For all of its faults there is no denying that this is a heartfelt film and it is rare to see a director of Scorsese’s status create such a personal work.

The film begins with an inkling of Ferreira’s torment as he is forced to watch his fellow priests being scalded to death by the Japanese. Neeson’s eloquently mute response suggests a man at the end of his own particular Via Dolorosa, a man on the edge of the abyss. By contrast Rodrigues and Garrpe are full of certainty and missionary zeal; they are absolute in the truth of their faith because it has never been tested. Once in Japan however they are forced to consider their relationship with their faith, with their devoted flock, and with their God.

Rodrigues constantly asks for signs, as though his belief must be validated like a store loyalty card. The film’s equating of Rodrigues with Christ is a little heavy-handed; if there is a comparison to be made it is surely with the anguished Ferreira rather than the needy Rodrigues. However, there is little response to Rodrigues’s many moments of Gethsemane; he is left to confront the silence of God while, at the same time, Scorsese suggests to the audience, he may actually be encountering the deafness of man. His new parishioners are being martyred and tortured around him but still they refuse to give him up, leaving him to look a little callow and undeserving. The more interesting of the two priests is Garrpe; Rodrigues seems to believe an accommodation can be reached with the Japanese while Garrpe is much more of a liberation theologian. Sadly, Garrpe’s character is underexplored leaving us with a one-note variation on the main theme.

Scorsese’s recent work has been characterised by a visual brio, as in The Aviator (2004) or The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), which has disguised the inherent emptiness of the subject matter. With Silence he has stripped everything back with near-monastic rigour. The dialogue is dry and functional, even in those scenes where Rodrigues is being interrogated by a Japanese overlord and his interpreter – excellent performances by Issei Ogata and Tadanobu Asano. It is only when Ferriera finally reveals the reasons for his apostasy and outlines the fundamental futility of their mission that it bursts into shocking eloquence.

Visually the film is equally spare. There are scenes here that echo Rosselini or Bresson – Pasolini’s Gospel of Matthew (1964) also came to mind - but for all of its minimalism there are moments when the film also stands comparison with the work of another of Scorsese’s heroes, David Lean. Scorsese and his cinematographer Rodrigo Pieto have taken scenes of the most horrific torture and martyrdom and infused them with a beauty which is often deeply moving despite the images. I am thinking especially of the showpiece crucifixion at sea which haunts the viewer long after the film has gone.

Scorsese has been criticised for ignoring the Japanese perspective in this film, but I struggle to see what his options might have been. He is a white, European Catholic in his seventies dealing with a mission ordered by white European Catholics of his age. It seems to me that he is entitled to only look at one side of the story providing he does so with honesty and integrity, which I believe is the case here. He makes the case for theological imperialism fairly well, I think.

Silence, as I said, is not perfect. The casting of the bland Andrew Garfield, for one thing, seems like a misstep to me. But the power of Neeson’s performance and the questions he raises for an attentive viewer mean that for me Silence is the beginning and not the end of a conversation.