The Spanish Prisoner

Having grown up in Massachusetts, I have fond memories of Cape Anne. So I forward to seeing Manchester by the Sea, written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, which is set there.

Lee (Casey Affleck) works as a janitor. He is a sullen and withdrawn person, who is not well liked by his building’s tenants. One day, Lee gets a phone call saying that his older brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), has had a heart attack. When he arrives at the hospital, he learns that Joe has died. Lee goes to Manchester-by-the-Sea, the town where he grew up, to put Joe’s affairs in order. He learns, to his dismay, that Joe has appointed him as the guardian of his teenage son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges). We learn through a series of flashbacks that Lee’s own children were killed in a fire that he accidentally started. Lee doesn’t want to move back to the town because of the bad memories he has associated with it. He also has differences with Patrick, who wants to keep his father’s fishing boat, even though it is badly in need of repair. He also has encounters with his ex-wife, Randi (Michelle Williams). Lee has to take on the burden of responsibility for Patrick while struggling with his personal demons.

Manchester by the Sea is an emotionally honest film. I like the fact that the main character is never completely redeemed. This is not one of those “feel good” movies in which the crusty outsider is suddenly revealed to be some sort of hero. Lonergan has too much respect for the audience to play that sort of trick. Although Lee ends up helping Patrick to keep his father’s boat, he does so partly out of self-interest.

Manchester by the Sea is the best film I’ve seen this year.

The Love Witch, written and directed by Anna Biller, tells the story of Elaine (Samantha Robinson), a woman who practices witchcraft. She entices men to fall in love with her, and they all end up dying in one way or another. This film reproduces the look and feel of a 1960’s low-budget horror film.

The critics have been awfully kind to this film. It received a 95% “fresh” rating on the Rotten Tomatoes website. (It received only a 66% audience score.) I honestly can’t see why. Yes, the film’s evocation of 1960’s kitsch is amusing – at first. And there are some funny moments. However, there are too many scenes that are pointless and uninteresting. The numerous witch coven scenes are banal and add nothing to the story. Furthermore, the deliberately stilted dialogue makes it impossible to care about any of the characters. The man sitting behind me in the theatre got up and left in the middle of it, and I was tempted to join him. To me, there is something incestuous about this idea that merely imitating an earlier style of film is somehow an achievement.

Nocturnal Animals, written and directed by Tom Ford, is based on a novel by Austin Wright. Susan (Amy Adams) is an art gallery director who is emotionally estranged from her husband, Hutton (Armie Hammer). One day she receives in the mail a manuscript of a novel written by her ex-husband, Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal). It is dedicated to her. The novel tells a story about a family being attacked by a gang of hoodlums. The film alternates between scenes from the novel and scenes from Susan’s life.

Nocturnal Animals basically consists of a violent story about rape and murder embedded within a muted and unresolved story about a woman going through a mid-life crisis. The fact that Edward would dedicate such a violent novel to his ex-wife is apparently meant to be seen as psychologically significant, but this idea is never developed, because Edward never appears except in flashback scenes from twenty years earlier. Indeed, the lurid story-within-a-story doesn’t illuminate the outer story in any way. (Contrast this with a film like The Clouds of Sils Maria, in which the inner story deepens the outer one.) At times, this film seems to be criticizing the contemporary art scene, although this idea is never really developed either.

The total of Nocturnal Animals is less than the sum of its parts.