Manchester By the Sea: (2016, Kenneth Lonergan): Before I saw Manchester by the Sea, I knew it would be devastating and expected it to be dour. All the reviews alluded to a terrible tragedy at the center of the film. I managed not to spoil myself so I won’t spoil you either but I will tell you that what Lee (Casey Affleck), a janitor in Quincy, Massachusetts has gone through is actually worse than what I had guessed (and I am usually a very accurate guesser when it comes to movies, it’s one of my talents). He works and he lives in a tiny, incredibly depressing basement apartment, speaking to no one and for fun he goes to bars to pick fights. When he finds out that his brother Joe, (Kyle Chandler) has finally died of his ongoing heart condition, Lee must return to his hometown, the Manchester of the title to care for Joe’s seventeen year old son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges).
Casey Affleck is stunning as a character who wants to do the right thing, maybe even wants to move on, but literally can’t. At first sight his performance is almost plain, as Lee in the present, he is numb, unemotive, he speaks with almost no cadence in his voice and barely moves his face. It’s as if there is not one moment where he isn’t caught in guilt, in mourning, in regret. And we also see the contrast of Lee when was living in Manchester with his wife (Michelle Williams). In the present, he wants to help his nephew, and part of him wants to stay in Manchester and restart a real life, but the weight of a mistake he made years earlier can’t allow him to. I loved the relationship between Patrick and Lee, it was very natural and stilted at the same time, because these two people don’t know each other since Lee moved away. Lonergan is always so wonderful at creating such human characters, that he makes it so easy to understand their motivations, to empathize with them completely. Affleck uses his whole body to portray a man that is dead on the inside, but who still feels an obligation and love for his family, you feel his sadness in every single moment.
Michelle Williams may be the most expressive and vulnerable actress working today and in both flashback and present day, her brief scenes with Affleck are wonderful. All of the supporting roles, everyone from Kyle Chandler to Tate Donovan to C.J. Wilson as Joe’s business partner and friend are wonderful and just add such a layer of truthfulness to the film. It sounds weird with the description I just gave but the movie is actually laugh at loud funny at times. Like life, there are moments of extreme levity, so even though its completely a story about grief and how it can be unrelenting and overwhelming, the movie doesn’t feel excessively bleak. In fact, I put it on when I wrote this review and I was struck again at the perfect balance between extreme grief and humor. The movie can seamlessly go from tragedy to comedy in moments and that is a really hard balance to strike. If I had voted for Best Picture, this would have been my choice.
La La Land: (2016, Damien Chazelle): When I walked out of La La Land, I turned to K and said “I loved it”, I think I may have even had tears in my eyes. And I did. I loved the story of Mia, (Emma Stone) an aspiring actress and Seb (Ryan Gosling) an aspiring jazz musician. They meet cute and fall in love. Mia has talent but she doesn’t have confidence. Seb has talent but he can’t compromise his artistic visions. I loved Damien Chazelle’s confident direction and glossy presentation, just as much in love with Los Angeles as with the story he is telling. The songs, especially “City of Stars” and “Audition” are charming and I thought that even though Stone and Gosling are not great singers, their charisma and real chemistry made it even more delightful.
And I loved watching them fall in love, and its glorious and transporting. I was entranced. La La Land manages to capture in an entirely artificial way the real feeling of falling in love, the magic moments when even though you are surrounded by the city you are all alone. They meet and they hate each other, but really they love each other, and the viewer falls in love too. And I loved how Seb helps Mia gain confidence encouraging her to write a one woman show and quit her barista job. And Mia encourages Seb too, helping him hold onto his dream of opening a jazz club even as he joins a band that he has artistic reservations about.
I was as enchanted with the film as they are with each other even when (here are the spoilers!) Mia lands her dream role and they say goodbye overlooking the Hollywood sign. They tell each other poignantly that they will always love each other. We skip forward five years and Chazelle presents us with both of our main characters, happy living their professional dreams but apart. He then gives us a beautifully conceived dream ballet meets alternate reality sequence where Seb and Mia imagine their lives together. It is filmed both as a fantasy musical number with beautiful homages to An American In Paris and Singing in the Rain and as a more realistic scene with home movie images of Mia and Seb living out their lives (a la The 25th Hour, which does it a million times better).
And in the moment, I was caught up, I had tears in my eyes and I was deeply moved. But a few hours later even, I felt uneasy and I couldn’t put my finger on it. I felt manipulated. I felt like the entire premise of La La Land was something that I just couldn’t stand behind in the end. Chazellle, was trying to have it both ways, give us the happy ending but deny the couple being together. And thats fine, some of the great screen romances end with couples apart. Casablanca, Brief Encounter, the Umbrellas of Cherbourg, even my beloved Before Sunrise ends with the characters parting and not knowing if they will ever see each other. But in the Umbrellas of Cherbourg, which La La Land owes a lot to, the character’s choose not be together because of terrible circumstances (war, unplanned pregnancy), not just professional ambition. If Mia are Set are supposed to be the great romance that La La Land presents, shouldn’t one of them or both of them compromise just a little to try and make it work? And if they aren’t meant to be together and their relationship is just meant to teach them a lesson or helps them, why the heartbreaking sequence at the end? In a movie like La La Land that doesn’t feel right. It’s a musical, its a fantasy, it seemed counterintuitive to everything we’d seen. At the end of Singin’ in the Rain, Don and Cathy don’t have to choose between success and love, they get both because it’s a movie, maybe? But La La Land is first and foremost a movie with a capital M. And if Chazelle wanted to portray a more realistic version of a “Hollywood Romance”, he could have executed it less as an homage to classic musicals to the point of imitation. Weeks after watching a movie I thought I loved, I couldn’t help a nagging feeling that was creeping up on me, La La Land was all homage, all style: it felt false.
In the end La La Land left me with the narrative that professional ambition is more important than personal contentment. That following your dream is number one, above everything and everyone. That you can’t have everything, but if you have to choose, career is over love. Mia and Seb chose the idea of the “dream” over the reality of their happiness. But I wanted Mia and Seb to find something more important than the idea of their “dream”. I wanted to tell them that you can be still be an artist, and a success even if you compromise your “dream”. You can be an actor without being a movie star, you can be a musician without owning a club. That maybe the “dream” is each other, finding someone you can share your life with, that’s the thing you can’t ever give up.
Julie
After K and I left Las Vegas, we both felt that the fun part of our trip was over. We had already covered approximately 1,500 miles but we had done it relatively leisurely, and had taken three days to relax in Palm Springs and another in two in Las Vegas. Now, Monday morning we had to cover approximately 2,500 miles in six days. Our first stop was in Flagstaff, Arizona. We chose it because it was on the way, nothing more. K and I both wanted to stop at the Grand Canyon, but we were already feeling fatigue. One thing when you drive all day, is all you want to do is get there. We had plans to stop at fun restaurants on the side of the road (we also had our two pups in the car, so that makes things way more complicated), but lots of days, we ended up just eating fast food in the car. We wanted to be able to enjoy and explore the destinations on our route as much as we could in the short time we had. I guess we’ll leave the grand canyon for when we eventually return home to the West Coast! The drive from Las Vegas to Flagstaff was a beautiful one though, we passed the Hoover Dam and saw the wide open dessert of Arizona. We also made a fun stop on Route 66 for lunch in the town of Seligman Arizona at West Side Lilo’s, a delicious diner. It was nice to sit down and relax and check out the atmosphere, there were taxidermied animals on the wall, and friendly waitresses and huge never ending refills of soda. The food was hearty and amazingly delicious, plus there was a tourist trap across the street of a fake western town and you know i had to check it out for Instagram and to get a picture of Rufus in the “town” jail.
Frankly the rest of our trip was pretty uneventful, we wanted to get to Alexandria, Virginia and we wanted to get there quick. And after leaving Santa Fe, the landscape got much less interesting at least through the Oklahoma, Texas and Arkansas. The next day was a long driving day to Oklahoma City, where a dear friend of mine lives. K and I left early and only stopped to have barbecue in Amarillo, Texas at Spicy Mike’s BBQ Haven. It was amazing, I hadn’t really Texas barbecue before and it was so delicious! I had pulled pork, K had brisket, and the baked beans were amazing, smoky and delicious. That evening, we had a lovely visit with friends before heading out on the last leg of our journey.
When I think of the last two days of our journey, I can’t help but think of the line in Book of Mormon, “And here’s the part of our story that gets a little bit sad”. K and I had originally planned to stop in Memphis one night, Nashville and next (a relatively short drive) and then push it all the way to Alexandria in an epic 10 hour final day. But at this point, we were exhausted. We had two dogs in the car, we were getting up super early and trying to not stop so that we could enjoy the cities and towns we arrived in. We were done. And the drive to Memphis was another seven hours. I wanted to see Graceland and the Civil Rights Museum, but I also wanted the trip to be over. So we made the decision to go straight to Nashville, making the day a grueling ten hours. When you drive that long, you both want to get out of the car and stop and you don’t, because you just want to get there. I have never wanted to drive across the country and I will probably do it twice in my life. The drive was the only day that was miserable, it rained all through Arkansas, a driving, heavy rain. We stopped for gas in probably the grossest little town ever and drove straight through Little Rock. We got off the freeway to go to a Sonic, a place we had never tried and the sign indicated it was five miles away. No thank you, too much of a diversion. So back on the freeway we went. Within a few miles, there was a sudden slow down. An accident had happened moments earlier. As we approached a semi on the right side, we saw a pick up truck, completely ruined and people standing around. And then I saw it, a man lying in the road, thrown from the truck. It was horrible, he was clearly dead. We made it through even before the cops which I was thankful for because the road was actually closed overnight. Wear your seatbelt each and every time you get in a car, it can save your life. That man didn’t wake up that morning thinking today was the day he died and if he worn his seatbelt, perhaps it wouldn’t have been.
