A Ghost Story

In A Ghost Story, Casey Affleck plays a man who dies in a car accident, and spends the rest of the movie a ghost, donning the stock white bed sheet with two eyeholes cut into it, like one of the trick-or-treaters from It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown. Much of the film involves Affleck's character, besheeted, standing inside his old house, watching his former wife, played by Rooney Mara, as she navigates her unexpected new life as a young widow. The film was written and directed by David Lowery, and its simple and austere plot and filmmaking may be a direct reaction against the big-budget Pete's Dragon, which Lowery was also working on at the time. But there's nothing in A Ghost Story to hold our attention. The film ponders life's big questions in an obvious and dull way, and much of it is simply static. We're left to fill in long scenes of people standing, staring, saying nothing, doing nothing, with our own thoughts and feelings. I like a film that gives me space to enter its world and think about it, but the world of A Ghost Story is drab and listless, and the longer the movie went on, the more I began to itch for something dramatic and over-the-top: Give me an overacted Tennessee Williams adaptation over this dismal stuff any day of the week. The film reaches some kind of philosophical head at a party scene, near the end, after even Casey Affleck's ghost has somewhat faded into the background. A guest at the party delivers a long speech about the meaningless of life. The movie's explorations of these questions, however admirable and bold, is not very interesting. Perhaps we're meant to experience some kind of catharsis from A Ghost Story, or to experience it as cinematic poetry. If it is a cinematic poem, it's from the Mary Oliver school of poetry,  brimming with self-congratulatory observations that are militantly simple and "earthy."

"Manchester by the Sea" is the feel-sad movie of the year.

With Manchester by the Sea, writer-director Kenneth Lonergan returns as the master of the sad family drama, although after you watch a Kenneth Lonergan movie, you start to wonder if there’s any other kind. What sets Lonergan apart from so many other filmmakers is his deep commitment to the moral failings of his characters. We want them to wake up, to change their lives for the better, to say “I’m sorry” and “I love you”, but so many of them “just can’t beat it,” as Lee, the main character in Manchester, finally admits. 

Lonergan’s directing debut, You Can Count on Me, was the gem of 2000, a supposedly bad year for movies, that featured wonderful, heartfelt, and delightfully nutty performances from Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo as a dysfunctional brother and sister coming to terms with the tragic deaths of their parents—when they were small children—and so many other things that have happened to them in the subsequent twenty years of their lives. Manchester By the Sea likewise hinges on several tragedies, one of them in the present (the death of Lee’s brother Joe, played by Kyle Chandler in flashback), and one from the past, rearing its head like a specter and consuming Lee apparently for good.

As Lee, Casey Affleck gives a heartbreaking performance. In an early scene, he’s drinking at a bar and erupts in anger at two strangers, because they're staring at him. The chip on Lee's shoulder weighs him down, and anger is the only emotion he can produce; it wells up uncontrollably and spills out into the lives of everyone around him. But we get the impression Lee’s always been sort of an asshole, even before all the funerals that have left him emotionally dead. He’s a gruff, tough, wise-talking blue-collar boy from Manchester, Massachusetts, and when he’s called back to his hometown (now he’s a handyman living in Quincy, just outside Boston) because of Joe’s unexpected death, everyone knows him, and quite a few people mutter under their breath, “that was him. Lee Chandler.” 

The film revolves around the relationship between Lee and his 16-year-old nephew, Patrick (Lucas Hedges, giving a funny, salty, and sharp performance). Lee reluctantly assumes guardianship over his nephew, and the two of them eke out some kind of existence, although Lee keeps threatening to move them back to Boston, despite the fact that Patrick’s life—his two girlfriends, his athletics, his rock band, and his dad’s boat, which has been left to him—are all there in Manchester.

But there’s too much life in Manchester for Lee, or too much death, rather. As the two of them drive to a neighboring town to arrange Joe’s memorial, they pass a graveyard, and Lee remarks to Patrick, “there’s no funeral home in Manchester, but the cemetery’s here.” Manchester itself becomes a monument to Lee’s grief, and to the life he once had with his children and his ex-wife Randi (played by Michelle Williams, whose performance is so good she even wrings a few tears out of Affleck’s hardened Lee). 

And even though Manchester by the Sea is sure to squeeze the moisture out of its audience by the gallon, the film isn’t just a somber tearjerker. Lonergan is too invested in the humanity of his characters to leave out humor, even at its darkest, like when, in a flashback, a doctor tells Joe he has congestive heart failure. “It’s a bad disease,” the doctor says, trying to be honest and sounding too glib; “What’s a good disease?” Joe asks, and Joe’s wife, Elise, storms out of the hospital room, unable to laugh at such a frightening moment. Patrick, though grieving his father's death, doesn't stop being a teenage boy: his multiple attempted conquests with one of his girlfriends comes to mind, or the moments when he scolds his uncle for being socially awkward, or when, during Joe’s funeral, we can hear the vibrations of Patrick’s cell phone from a text he’s receiving, layered under the classical piece that scores the entire sequence. 

Lonergan masterfully curates the music for certain dramatic sections of the film, including the afore-mentioned funeral, during which Lee and Patrick greet numerous guests, among them Randi, who's remarried and expecting another child. Just about any dialogue Lonergan might invent would probably be trite or at the very least repetitive; the music in these scenes (he uses Handel, Massenet, Albinoni, and Poulenc) speaks something truer than words, on an emotionally true level that deepens our own response, letting these composers' music fill in the emotional beats: such juxtapositions could easily veer toward the self-important or the histrionic, but Lonergan knows the line of tragedy and comedy and he and his actors walk it with an astonishing finesse. And in the process, the film becomes all the more personal to the viewer. These characters don't do what we expect them to in movies; they do what they do, because they've become as human as anyone we know in real life. That's what makes the hurt so good. 

Indeed, Manchester by the Sea will tear out your heart and put it back and stitch you up. It won’t tell you it loves you, but it will love you in its own way, perhaps with its remarkable mixture of brutal honesty and tenderness. There’s no better film to see during the Christmas season, when the pressure to be happy is unbearable, and you need a beautifully made, perfectly structured feel-sad movie to keep you company. I loved it. 

With Gretchen Mol, C. J. Wilson, Matthew Broderick, Kara Hayward, and Erica McDermott.

Interstellar

This is my theory: One wintry evening by the fire, writer-director Christopher Nolan was reading Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time to his kids when suddenly he realized his next movie project was right in front of him. In A Wrinkle in Time, three children travel through space by basically bending time in half to cover the same distance much more quickly. (Remember the Tesseract?) The novel even includes a handy diagram of how this works as it’s explained to the children by three old women named Mrs. Who, Mrs. Which, and Mrs. Whatsit. (They are actually shape-shifting star-goddesses that later turn into magical talking unicorns.) Yes, we may in fact have Madeleine L’Engle to thank for Interstellar, which plays like a grown-up version of her supremely odd children’s novel but fashioned for a 21^st century audience. Nolan's characters somehow manage to loop time too, only there isn't a giant talking brain controlling everything in Interstellar. (Actually, this might have been an improvement.)

Inception, Nolan’s last non-superhero project, wrung high praise from movie-goers who felt that their beloved maestro had borne unto them a mind-blowing cinematic experience. The same expectation is in the air for Interstellar, as the breathless, exhilarated tweets and blurbs from certain critics and fans indicate. But I wonder how many of them will admit that what Nolan offers in both Inception and Interstellar is really just mass confusion. As a director, Nolan is fond of grand themes and big concepts, but he falters in his efforts to knit them all together into one cohesive piece of filmmaking. Interstellar is much too thin in places while being far too thick in others. And regardless of how the film was incepted into Nolan’s mind, I wish his editor, Lee Smith, had taken some garden shears to it. At 167 minutes, it’s a magnificently overblown plod through the tedious infrastructure of space and time.

(The next three paragraphs contain mild spoilers.)

The plot of Interstellar isn’t quite as bonkers as that of Inception, but its concepts are equally faux-complex and misguided. The film is set in the not-too-distant future when a worldwide blight has pressed the human race for so long that extinction looms like an ominous shadow on the horizon. A former engineer and pilot (played by Matthew McConaughey) who’s now a farmer in some Midwestern location, accidentally stumbles across NASA, which was secretly restored by the government in order to mine other galaxies for livable planets.

So McConaughey, three other scientists, and two robots (who talk and crack jokes and look like rectangular Rubix cubes) embark on an unprecedented journey that may or may not save the human race from total extinction. Apparently, the real point of Interstellar is to bring new validation to the space age because it represented such a strong mythic tradition for certain generations.

We’re meant to believe that Matthew McConaughey’s accidental meeting with NASA—which quite literally launches him into a space quest—is some kind of cosmically ordained event. But later, we find that he’s not really the key to it all. It’s his daughter, who’s played as a child by Mackenzie Foy, as a grown-up woman by Jessica Chastain, and eventually as an elderly woman by Ellen Burstyn. There’s a scene near the end of the film where McConaughey hurdles through space only to find himself inside time represented as a physical dimension. There he can see the past unfolding again, and communicate with his daughter, now a grown-woman, in the present. The explanation for this and other ideas in the movie is always a bit fuzzy, just like it was in Inception.

As much as Nolan—who wrote the screenplay with his brother Jonathan—claims to love and appreciate the film medium, and as much as he pontificates about making movies for people who love movies, it’s remarkable how little Nolan has learned about the whole process of telling a story cinematically. Interstellar is technically well-made and has scenes of grandeur and beauty, but it doesn’t actually tell its story visually. The Nolans’ script relies stubbornly on clunky dialogue to move the film along. The script is full of seemingly complex ideas that apparently have no way of being explicated except through scenes of endless prattle between characters.

It’s hard not to compare this movie to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, which is overrated but still worth seeing. One can certainly see the Nolans reaching for the same level of transcendence. But where 2001 succeeds is in its stubborn resistance to dialogue. There are long moments of nothing but the film’s ostentatious visual grandeur and the equally high-minded concepts beneath the visuals. 2001 is showy but beautifully made, the story is relatively simple, and despite some long and boring parts, Kubrick’s film works on a level that Interstellar does not. Looking at 2001 might evoke boredom, awe, wonder, terror, annoyance, and fear. I never felt any of these things in Interstellar. I wasn’t really even bored with it, just uninvolved.

Where 2001 imagines big, self-important themes visually (and thus, somewhat more subtly), Interstellar pounds away at them in the writing. There are whole chunks of textbook-sounding dialogue or big pronouncements from characters revealing to us the film’s noble themes: heroism, love, life and death, and, perhaps most importantly, the unmitigated majesty of the space program. We get repeated grumblings about the good old days of space exploration such as, “We used to look up at the sky and wonder…Now we just look down.” The film achingly longs for the past, and it’s tempting to read this as coming directly from the Nolans, as though they’re two curmudgeons bemoaning the dismantling of NASA as the end of the American ability to dream and wonder.

The film does have exciting moments, tense moments, powerful moments, but they are delivered with a very heavy hand. It’s as though every scene in the movie requires those penetrating gongs from the 2001 theme, and we’re supposed to erupt in a chorus of weepy-eyed excitement and applause. The emotions in this movie are big and grand too, and they’ve been paired with a race-(against time) -in-space plot to elevate them. Big, noble themes require a big production and a sweeping, life-or-death journey. There’s no room for anything small here. Even when the movie goes dead silent, it’s a ruse. We’re waiting for the next gong to sound, or the next emotional wallop.

As I sat through Hurricane Interstellar, I remembered the feeling I got during Inception four years ago: I just didn’t care about its silly overcomplicated plot, and I felt disconnected from the movie because of how insipid, how exhaustingly “over-thunk” its concepts were.

Jessica Chastain is, for me, the only breath of fresh air in the movie. Anne Hathaway feels wrong for her part as the ambitious scientist, one of the crew members who accompanies McConaughey on a ship called Endurance. (Presumably an allusion to the ship that became trapped in the snow in Antarctica in 1914.) Hathaway exudes a certain brattiness when she needs to appear tough. (It makes one really appreciate Sandra Bullock’s performance—and screen presence—in Gravity.) And the movie’s only way of humanizing her is in making her out of the loop. (She finds out she was tricked about something major, which I won’t mention here for the sake of spoilers.)

McConaughey is fine, but he doesn’t really connect, as much as he tries to. There’s a scene in the film when he watches 23 year’s worth of video messages transmitted from his kids—who are getting older while he has remained the same age—and he dissolves into a blubbering mess of tears. The movie wants us to feel for him, but the scene isn’t affecting. There are multiple scenes of this kind, and it becomes clear that the filmmakers are just cruel to their characters, forcing them to suffer so that they can experience emotional torture and “connect” with the audience. It feels like a cheap, manipulative play for affection. Nolan is going for catharsis in space, but the humanity and the emotions in Interstellar feel forced and calculated, striving for importance with their bigness. 

With Michael Caine, David Gyasi, Wes Bentley, Bill Irwin and Josh Stewart as the voices of the two robots (neither of these character registers the way HAL or R2D2 do), Casey Affleck, John Lithgow, Topher Grace and Matt Damon.  

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

An elegiac Western, brooding with grim death, about the life and death of Jesse James, played by Brad Pitt. Director Andrew Dominik and cinematographer Richard Deakins capture the vastness of the Midwestern terrain which serves as the stage for the countless train robberies and stand-offs and meandering conversations in breezy meadows. It's vacuous like a Terrence Malick film, and while its subject has a certain dramatic pull, watching it lumber along for nearly three hours reminded me why Westerns are so utterly unappealing, with a few exceptions. They're either gratuitously unrealistic to the point of being macho right-wing fantasies or they're so grimly realistic that you can't get an inkling of enjoyment out of them (much like Meek's Cutoff). It's quiet and ponderous like There Will Be Blood, which is a better movie. It had a poetic energy to it while Jesse James feels torpid and unimaginative.

Brad Pitt tries to layer a philosophical undercurrent into his performance as Jesse James, and Casey Affleck, as the calculating Robert Ford in the title, turns squeaky-voiced weaselly-ness into an art form--an undignified, desperately unappealing one. Pitt registers. He's an actor who hasn't really gotten his due. But the movie is unsustained--parts are better than the whole--and so his performance and his staying power are rendered somewhat less effective. The supporting cast is populated with good actors who are bogged down by a boring script and the shackles of self-important filmmaking: Sam Rockwell, Jeremy Renner, Paul Schneider, Mary-Louise Parker, Sam Shepard, and Zooey Deschanel.