[214 points / 22 votes]
“I saw Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester By The Sea at the Sundance Film Festival the morning of January 24th, 2016. (Later that afternoon I saw Kelly Reichardt's Certain Women. It was a very good day.) I mention this not to sound like a showoff calling ‘firsties,’ but rather to explain just how long I've been living with the film, and the front row seat we festival-goers had for how perceptions change as movies get chewed up by The Thinkpiece Industrial Complex.
“It's difficult to believe that the Oscars used to be held in April, given the endless grind of what's come to be known as ‘Awards Season’ -- which now lasts half-a-year, stretching from the Telluride Film Festival in early September to the Oscars at February's merciful end. During this time there are frontrunners and there are dark horses, with exorbitantly expensive campaigns keeping a cottage industry of nutty pundits in business, struggling to either capture or maintain ‘momentum’ through an endless procession of precursor awards seemingly designed to sap any of the joy and spontaneity out of seeing actors you like dressing up in fancy clothes and giving emotional speeches on television.
"’Momentum’ comes and goes, but the movies stay the same. When I saw Manchester last January I said I didn't think I'd see a better film all year, and I was right. (Silence came awfully close, though.) At that time, Kenneth Lonergan was a Hollywood pariah still in exile after the six-year editing room battle over his sophomore feature Margaret. Casey Affleck was basically Batman's kid brother, struggling to get back into the industry's good graces after he and Joaquin Phoenix's (brilliant) performance art prank I’m Still Here went over like a fart in church. Here was a strong, sad little movie without easy resolutions or even a theatrical distributor -- one that I and most others at those early screenings assumed was destined to be doomed commercially but remembered fondly by film lovers.
“Of course Amazon Studios felt otherwise, buying the film for a jaw-dropping ten million dollars and going on to gross almost five times that at the box office on such a tsunami of hype that my friend Ty Burr's rave review in The Boston Globe was worded as a warning to potential audience members expecting the film to cure their psoriasis and lower their mortgage rates. Manchester had more than ‘momentum,’ it was already ordained as a modern American classic.
“But the problem with our accelerated media culture is that we quickly run out of angles with which to feed the content maw, and attention spans aren't what they used to be. (A lot of the time we in the cultural commentariat have grown tired of arguing about them before they're even released.) These films get picked to the bone during the Bataan Death March to Oscar Night, and contrary takes are what get clicks, which is why you see bizarre headlines calling La La Land ‘fascist’ and such.
“Manchester By The Sea got tagged and dismissed in certain circles as a ‘sad white people’ movie, which I guess is technically accurate as the characters are indeed white and often quite sad. I understand that Trump's election threw a lot of us lefties for a loop, but if you can't feel sympathy for a janitor whose kids died in a fire because he's a member of the white working class then you've got much bigger problems than a movie. The discourse got even sillier and more shrill on the run up to awards, with Lonergan derided as of all things a Hollywood insider and Affleck's checkered personal history dragged into nearly every discussion of the film. I was told by more than one person that Manchester By the Sea is ‘a Trump supporter's Best Picture pick.’ (I guess none of these folks heard of Hacksaw Ridge.)
“Now that the Oscars are finally over things will hopefully settle down and we can go back to having real discussions about the brilliance of these performances and whether or not you dig Lonergan's distracting classical music cues. Despite changes in perception, presidents and thinkpiece trends, Manchester By The Sea is still the same film I loved last January, and it's the kind of movie that will endure for some time.” ~ Sean Burns
Have I mentioned recently how glad I mostly am that I'm not a movie reviewer any more? Along with the mediocrity (at best) of all the work a working reviewer has to see in a year, it was the pretentious blather of other reviewers that finally burned me out. SB
ReplyDelete"all the work" above should be "80% of the work."
ReplyDelete