Super 8

There's been some internet buzz about the 10th anniversary of the release of the movie Super 8 being today. The movie was an okay-homage, but it's nothing to note on my calendar every year. 

This was written at the time of the film's release....ten years ago (don't expect a card...)

"Heavin' Steven"
or
"Asshole! Can You Stop Blowing Things Up for Two Seconds and Move the Camera?"

J.J. Abrams already had told you what this film would be with his first teaser-trailer and before anyone knew he was working on it.*  That first teaser had all the candy-smudged fingerprints of Steven Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind (by way of Jaws) through it...with a noticeable twist—the utility vehicle that looks so much like Roy Neary's from that film drives onto some railroad tracks and crashes into a train causing a massive derailment, and the freeing of...something. Something that goes crash-bang-boom in the night. And won't take the time to let you complete five notes of Zoltán Kodály's musical hand-signs.

Super 8 is very clearly a Spielberg homage: the kid-centric cast of fresh faces; the swooping crane shots making parabolas before reaching for the high vantage point; the big faces turning toward the camera; the empty sky shots that are just waiting for something to fill them; the overlapping dialog; the hiring of local yokels for "color"; the slow reveals—things that make a lot of damage before we really see anything; the dysfunctional families; the ostracized pint-sizers and geeks; the showman's brio of opening the curtain just a little...then closing it...again and again and again.**

Abrams is doing an homage to Spielberg (even got him to produce it), but it's still his movie, more so than, say, Tobe Hooper imprinted Poltergeist. If anything, this one is a little more polished (than MI:III and Star Trek [2009]) because it's trying to ape Spielberg—there's more technique and less hitting the camera for jitters' sake, like the movie was on a perpetual coffee-jag—even if the film purposefully, deliberately simulates 1970's film-grain and anamorphic lens-flares (that actually get irritating after awhile). But, the tone is more Abrams. If I can use a culinary metaphor, Spielberg's early run was like a sweet-and-sour dish at a family-friendly Asian restaurant; Abrams gooses everything up a couple spice-stars flipping the ratio between action and characterization (there's more of the latter than the former)—the action a bit grittier, the emotions a might more painful and the pangs a bit more heart-felt.

For one thing, Abrams likes girls. And by that I mean that he knows how to write for them. For all the time that he spent contemplating the heavens, the boy-filmmaker Spielberg did not understand that men and women come from different planets.*** Spielberg's women (in his early films) were tom-boys with girl-clothes, or icons that the men-folk didn't/couldn't fathom. Here, the women are people (when they're allowed to be more than caricatures—the older sister, played by AJ Michalka, doesn't much rise above "petulant teen" mode). Elle Fanning's Alice Dainard feels like a real-life human being, her emotions raw and just under the surface. It's no wonder Joe Lamb (Joel Courtney), the hero of the piece, is obsessed with her, beyond the fact that they're both motherless children with absent fathers (Ron Eldard, as a guilt-ridden alcoholic, and the great Kyle Chandler as Joe's Deputy Dad). Of course, they gravitate to each other—they're both dependable people in undependable worlds.

They meet—well, they already know each other by reputation from school—because baby-Orson Welles Charlie Kaznyk (Riley Griffiths) is making a Super-8 zombie movie for a an amateur film competition. Joe's half the crew, and Charlie has cast Alice as the dutiful "wife" of a zombie investigator (wonder where they train for that). During a night-time shoot at a far-flung railway station, the kids are witness to, and almost victims of, the spectacular train-crash—of the teaser—caused by a truck travelling the tracks to deliberately de-rail it. The sequence goes on a bit too long, but it is a "Holy Crap!" inducing spectacular where, despite the CGI that was certainly involved you worry for the young actors dodging the fireballs and sizable debris hurtling through the frame. Abrams is a bit more visceral that Spielberg was, and has a cruel way of making sure you glimpse everything while not letting up the pace. He also keeps the reveal of the "thing" as delayed as possible, exposing only bits and pieces, various debris-fields and the governmental cover-up feint that insures we go through the bulk of the film's progress without knowing exactly what in Ohio is going on.****

All for the better. With all the manic mayhem Abrams dishes out, the focus is more on the people caught in the web of circumstance than in the BEM behind it all—in that, Abrams has more in common with M. Night Shyamalan (specifically Signs, where it seemed apparent the writer-director didn't give a Sixth Sense about what the aliens were like, so much as what the humans were going through). This leads to a rushed finale where through some E.T. like-symbiosis the kids and the "creature" (oh, let's call him a "Horta," shall we?) come to a meeting of minds and a mutual focusing of priorities. Both must find "home," and both get there a might too hurriedly and conveniently.

Still, Abrams, despite truncating any deeply emotional pay-off in his ending, does manage to stay focused on what's important—the holding-on and the letting-go. If Super 8 isn't as moving in its consummation as its inspirations were, at least it reminds us—as the whole exercise set out to do—of how rich they were and how their power should not be overlooked or taken for granted.

*

**  He missed one thing, though: the opening shot along a fence of some kind.

*** The funny thing is (if I can be gossipy for a moment) is that Spielberg didn't fully grasp women until he'd worked with his present wife Kate Capshaw, who gives one of the most irritating performances of any woman in his films in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

**** At one point, I thought it was going to turn into a "giant spider" movie.

The Midnight Sky

It's Lonely Out in Space...

or 

Our Future...Didn't Quite Turn Out That Way

Barbeau Observatory, located near the Arctic Circle, has been evacuated after a global nuclear catastrophe—everyone wanted to go home for the end. Except for Dr. Augustine Lofthouse (George Clooney). Someone has to stay at the observatory watching the night skies and maybe contacting the space missions still out there. And he's dying anyway. As one of the departing techs observes, given the situation, he'll probably outlive them all.

There is one ship out there that hasn't been evacuated and is still occupied and functioning—the ship Æther, which went out to the orbit of Jupiter to explore K-23, a moon of the gas-planet that seems to be—as they say on "Trek"—"Class M". It can sustain human life. They're supposedly on their way back, but nobody knows that because they've been out of contact for a long time. Augustine has a personal stake in the mission as it was his theoretical work that inspired it, and he's completing his life's work trying to reach them to tell them that it's no longer a reconnaissance trip and to go back. There's nothing to come home to. 

Onboard ship, the crew—"Captain" David Oyelowo, Felicity Jones, Kyle Chandler, Tiffany Boone, and Demian Bichir—have successfully scouted the Jovian moon in question and it hits the "Goldilocks" sweet-spot of conditions: not too cold, not too hot, but "just right." Water is plentiful and vegetation abundant. The orange sky will take some getting used to, but the close proximity to Jupiter has its compensations and abundant landscape photo-ops.

The crew has been out of touch with Earth and that's caused some issues. Astronaut Sully (Jones) thinks there might be a glitch in their system somewhere, but the ship is complicated enough with artificially-generated gravity, supplies, greenhouses, and the like that trying to pin-point a fault would be harder than finding a hospitable planet in the Solar System. Now, on the leg home, they're spending a lot of time being nostalgic for Mother Earth and their families on it. A lot of time being spent in therapeutic holo-suites with family-memories. They don't know that anything is wrong on Earth or that there is nobody on Earth trying to contact them.

Except for Augustine, of course.

Now, the only one at the observatory, Augustine settles into a routine of taking pills, daily hemodialysis, the perfunctory meals (usually taken with scotch). Isolated and alone, he has a lot of time for there to be flash-backs, nightmares and mind-wanderings. So, he can be forgiven if, at breakfast, he finds a half-finished bowl of cereal sitting at the table. Maybe it's the aloneness, maybe it's the drinking, but obviously, the routine has slipped.

But, it's more than he's thinking. Wandering around the station, he finds a little girl (Caoilinn Springall)—curled up, sleeping, hiding. There had been some confusion during the evacuation...and then, this child. Another responsibility, which he is not ready to cope with. At first, he tells the deliberately mute child (whom he finds out is named "Iris") that she's on her own, that he can't handle the work AND take care of her. But, there's nowhere to send her. They are now stuck with each other, and she is now a constant presence ("Don't touch anything!" he frets while he's working "You know, there's no rule that says you have to TOUCH everything."). Eventually, she will be a comfort.

There are complications aboard the Æther: their trajectory from Jupiter is slightly off and they have to weigh whether to do course-correction burn or take a chance going through a route in space that hasn't been properly "mapped-out." Personally, I'd go for the course-correction because any deviancy from "true" will only increase the farther they go, but they vote to do nothing and risk it. How like "Earthlings". Oh, and Sully is pregnant with Captain Adwole's child. Everyone has a suggestion what to name it. Except for that off-kilter trajectory, everything is nominal.

Back on Earth, the atmosphere around Barbeau is becoming increasingly toxic and time is running out, so Augustine decides to travel to a weather station at Lake Hazen with a more powerful antenna in the off-chance that it'll be just enough to reach the Æther. He packs up his supplies, dialysis gear, and does the proper parent-thing of bundling up the girl for a snow-day, and they set off on a snowmobile to reach their destination. 

At the Æther, there is another problem: a hitherto unknown cluster of ice-fragments is hurtling around the solar system in the asteroid belt and the ship runs smack-dab into it, causing a lot of damage to a couple of the ship's systems—radar and communications, mostly. They're going to need the communications, so they decide to "take a stroll around the block" and make repairs. Sully, Adwole, and Maya (Boone) suit up and crawl around the outside of the craft with their spare parts to DIY the broken systems.  

At this point, you begin to realize time is running out on both sides of the solar system, despite there being very few people to do anything and a lot of space to do it in. In all that expanse—of space and snow-scape—the chances of connection, despite wonders of radio communication, are remote given the solitary beings 329 km apart. With all that geography, time becomes a precious commodity while also being a brutal deterrent. Nature, or the destruction of it, will make its course in its own time. It makes an interesting conundrum to ponder while everyone is trying to hurry things up...but can't.

The Midnight Sky is directed by Clooney and, given his access to so much material because of his demand, it's always interesting to ponder why he does the projects that he does. Perhaps his ever-increasing age (he's a "twinkly" 59 years) is making him consider that time is short and its one commodity that his earnings can't buy more of. But, this film—which looks great, and it's a pity that a film of this budget and scope isn't playing theaters (except in a limited Oscar-qualifying engagement), but is stuck in the limited dimensions of Netflix—has an interesting ability to stick in the head and make one consider the shortness of life amid the imponderable extent of cosmic time. 

And, as a director on this one, Clooney is focusing on spectacle rather than letting the performances carry it. The landscapes are artfully presented. The framings are formal, often symmetrical, only to break the rule to go full-tilt Alfonso Cuarón during the space-walk (and even then he has a nice feel for perspective—you're rarely disoriented). There are long stretches without dialog, but the movie doesn't drag and there's a nice sense that there isn't a lot of unnecessary "explaining" that needs to be done for the audience's benefit.

It also takes the time to have little "grace-notes," little touches of a shot or two which speak volumes about the characters without having to talk about it. The performances are uniformly good, but, for me, Demian Bichir and Kyle Chandler get the kudo's for most elegant acting here, with Tiffany Boone providing the most comic touches and the most tragic. A bonus is another of those lovely scores by Alexander Desplat.

It's a good watch, but it's not "whizz-bang." The Midnight Sky is one of those proverbial "good" science fiction films whose brain-shelf-life goes beyond the ephemeral "what happened there?" of its "Twilight Zone" machinations and makes one consider the possibilities mythic, parental, and biological all in one melancholy little package*—a 21st Century version of On the Beach** for the Space Age.

* Melancholy in the same way that George Carlin broke down the hopefulness behind Earth Day: "EARTH day! The EARTH will be FINE. WE'RE the ones who're fucked!"

** At one point in the film, Kyle Chandler's family man on the Æther is watching that Stanley Kramer picture in his room.

First Man

“I guess the question I'm asked the most often is: "When you were sitting in that capsule listening to the count-down, how did you feel?" Well, the answer to that one is easy. I felt exactly how you would feel if you were getting ready to launch and knew you were sitting on top of two million parts -- all built by the lowest bidder on a government contract.”

Astronaut John Glenn

The Man in the Glass Booth
or
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

I read James R. Hanson's biography of astronaut Neil Armstrong, "First Man" some months ago—I'd always been fascinated by the American Space Program of the 1960's when I was a kid—and I found the book a tedious slog. Despite my interest, it tested my ability to be fascinated by Armstrong's career, going into such extreme depth as listing Armstrong's scores during military flight training in the 1960's and the grind of astronaut training...as well as the author's fervently pushed sub-text that Armstrong was a mythical figure on a par with Adam. Plus, Armstrong was such a tight-lipped, interior soul that one got the impression that, despite the scrutiny and coverage of his career before and after the first moon landing, the man was pretty much a cipher, so unknowable that the author depended on other people's impressions to such a large extent that one never really got the sense that you knew the man, and certainly never warmed to him. The flaws were the most interesting things about him: he was an ace test-pilot but a horrible driver, seemingly never able to concentrate on the road, he had a stoicism that kept him apart from those he loved—his grueling schedule usually ensured that, anyway—and he was an innate problem-solver, which did him well at his job of controlling machines, but, on a human level, stymied him, particularly in the challenge of death—of Navy comrades, his only daughter Karen,*** and fellow astronauts (particularly Ed White, his next-door neighbor) killed in the process of the head-long rush to achieve the Moon landing within a ten year time-span.

With Armstrong's death in 2012, it was probably inevitable that they would make a film of Armstrong's life.* First Man encapsulates (pun intended) the intense period of Armstrong's life between the tail-end of his time testing X-15 rocket-planes to the moon landing of Apollo 11, a period of 8 years.** It begins with a disorienting shot looking out through grimy windows from the cockpit of an X-15. The camera buffets wildly. The noise is deafening, from the wind-shear, the clacking instruments, the creaking strains on the metal exterior, the rattling of anything not bolted down in the little compartment, the squawking chatter of the radio. Everything except the rattling of the pilot's teeth.

That X-15 is strapped to the underside of a B-52 and it will be dropped like a bomb, and, once it's fallen far enough to safely do so without blowing up its host-plane, the pilot will light up its rocket engines and take the X to its limits (which turned out to be a height of 67 miles and a maximum speed of 4,520 miles per hour). That plummeting drop might be the calmest part of the ride, because once the engines kick in, the X-15 is a shaking, vibrating brick that gets red hot in the friction of the atmosphere. Now the film is in 3-D (I didn't see it in that format or in IMAX), but, if it was also presented in Sensurround it would be intolerable. Damned effective in communicating what it's like in that circumstance, but probably beyond what a casual viewer munching popcorn could handle. It's a neat primer on what First Man does differently in the depiction of space travel that separates it from previous films on the subject in regards to the actual experience of the pioneers doing it.

For First Man, like its subject, is not exactly romantic when it comes to the Conquest of Space, but is, instead, realistic and practical. While most films look at the tiny vessels contrasted with the vastness of the space they're pushing through, First Man keeps you in the cockpit, from the vantage point of the sailors strapped in for dear life, who are warily watching the attitude indicators of their control panels as opposed to dreamily gazing at the stars out the window. Zero G is not something to be luxuriated in, it's a problem to be worked around, so that a stray foot doesn't hit the wrong toggle-switch and the floating clutter doesn't get in the way of the job.

Armstrong might have been the perfect candidate for the job. He loved flying and he loved the problem-solving of the task, trying to get it "just so" in the engineering from the time he had his siblings throwing out balsa wood airplanes from his window, so he could mark with popsicle sticks stuck in the yard the differences his adjustment would make in their aerodynamics. When the film starts in medias res of that X-15 flight, Armstrong goes too high and too fast, so that he ends up "skipping off the atmosphere" and has to find a radical way to use his attitude jets to give him enough drag to get the X-15 back to the ground. He makes it, but glances are passed between the ground crew: Armstrong's flights have been shaky lately; something's going on.

I see the moon, the moon sees me
shining through the leaves of the old oak tree
Oh, let the light that shines on me
shine on the one I love.

What's going on is shown in the next scene as a large menacing piece of chrome lowers to the head of a little girl; it is the Armstrong's daughter, Karen, and the worrying parents, Neil (Ryan Gosling) and Janet (Claire Foy), watch, their arms around each other, stricken—the child is being treated for a brain tumor, and, as we'll see, Armstrong keeps notebooks on her treatment, just as he does after his X-15 flights, but it's not going well. And over a shot of Armstrong watching over his sleeping daughter, as his fingers consider the strands of her hair, we hear a deliberate creaking of rope...

...it is the sound of her coffin being lowered into the ground, as Armstrong watches hollow-eyed. There will be flash-backs to the shot of her hair in his hands, the tactile sensation of his daughter later in the movie, but Armstrong, rarely—if ever—mentioned his daughter's death—at 2 1/2 years old—in the many interviews that he actually would allow. One can speculate, as Hanson, "writing to silence"**** in the biography, did, that his daughter's death informed the course of Armstrong's actions for the rest of his life and probably played a hand in his becoming a "deist," after having been raised by the devoutest of mothers. But, Armstrong's life was a full one and, no matter how artfully done in the book or movie, it probably can't be thinned down to making his daughter Karen the "Rosebud" of the movie, the Rosetta Stone that has all the answers.

After these scenes, the film then turns episodic—as so many bio-pics do—between highlights and low-lights in Armstrong's astronaut career: his applying for NASA and acceptance (during his interview when he's being questioned, one of the NASA hierarchy starts "I'm sorry about your daughter." and Armstrong's reply is "I'm sorry, is there a question?"), some training footage (which will become pertinent later), the deaths of fellow astronauts Elliot See and Charlie Bassett, and Armstrong's pick as commander of Gemini 8, which would prove an essential stepping-stone to the Apollo moon landing; It's mission is to rendezvous and dock with a previously launched Agena target, which Armstrong pulls off smoothly until he's out of communication with Mission Control, at which point the two locked vehicles begin to spin wildly out of control, and Armstrong makes the decision to separate from the target vehicle thinking that it has malfunctioned.

Once that happens, the capsule begins to spin faster—it wasn't a fault with the Agena, it is with their own capsule, and as it begins to spin faster and faster, approaching speeds that will cause the astronauts to black out, Armstrong shuts down his main thruster systems on the ship, suspecting them as the problem, and uses the forward thrusters for re-entry to bring the vehicle out of its death-tumble, effectively ending the mission as required by NASA protocols. The mission is seen as both a success and a failure—yes, its objective was achieved, but it is aborted early, days before its scheduled conclusion, lest the already used thrusters become essential for an eventual return to Earth .

Once Armstrong is cleared of any failure on his part—he is, in fact, lauded for saving his own life and that of his crew-mate, Dave Scott, he is then used as a NASA ambassador among politicians, and it is on one of those junkets he hears of the Apollo 1 fire, which costs the lives of veteran astronauts Gus Grissom, his neighbor Ed White and Roger Chaffee.***** He also narrowly escapes his own fiery death by his last minute ejection from a lunar landing trainer that malfunctions and loses control.

The rest of the film follows his subsequent training and command for Apollo 11, which, planned to be the first lunar landing if all the objectives are met, is the most prized assignment among the astronauts, but bares heavy responsibility and scrutiny, something that only makes Armstrong withdraw further into his work and away from his family.

The work is isolating, and, given all the unknowns about the lunar surface and whether diseases might be brought back to Earth from contact with the soil, the crew is kept in hermetically sealed chambers for press conferences and maintain a restricted access. As if the suits and pressurized conditions aren't enough, it seems like layers upon layers are being put between Armstrong and his family. At one point, just before leaving for the isolation before the launch, Armstrong's wife Janet demands that he sits down with his sons and explains to them the danger of his mission...and that he might not come back, something Armstrong wants to avoid talking about given the company line of "highest confidence in the Mission." It goes awkwardly and with not the best of resolutions. No one is exactly comforted.

The tensest part of the film is, of course, the Moon Landing itself, as Armstrong has to pilot where no pilot has gone before to a landing field that is nothing but pot-holes that could break one of the lander's spindly legs, all the time that alarms are going off warning that the computer can't process all of the information being funneled to it, the lander is low of fuel and running on fumes, and its auto-pilot decides that it's going to land in a large crater strewn with crippling boulders. Armstrong has to yank control from the targeted systems, try and overshoot the crater's lip, draining the fuel even more before touching down on another world. It was tense when it was happening live on television 49 years ago, and it's just as tense when Chazelle has his choice of angles and a galloping soundtrack from his composer Jason Hurwitz.

Damien Chazelle has now made three movies (he's now 33)—Whiplash, First Man, and La La Land (which was made during the long and complicated pre-production of First Man) and those three movies could not be more different in style, genre, and energy, but each one is a confident and accomplished film about obsession and sacrifice in pursuit of a cherished goal. The other films were wild, fast-moving things that frequently soared, where First Man—which is all about soaring—has its most sublime moments in stillness and incredible silence. One can quibble with Gosling's performance as Armstrong being too morose, generally—one can't find any fault in Claire Foy's performance...at all—as Armstrong may have been restrained but hardly the "Debbie Downer" one might assume from this movie. But, as a portrait of a sacrificing hero, First Man quite triumphantly communicates the measure of a measured man.

* Clint Eastwood and Warner Bros. bought the rights to "First Man" in 2003, but the film never moved forward until acquired by Steven Spielberg for his Dreamworks Studio.

** Although Armstrong's boyhood fascination with model airplanes is hinted at by the sound of toy engines over the Universal/Dreamworks logos before the first image of the film—in the cockpit of an X-15—appears.

**** "Writing to silence" is a lovely little phrase that you can't "google" to any accuracy, but refers to the writerly act of speculation when there isn't anyone alive to provide the inspiration...or rebuttal...to what you commit to the page.

***** Okay, let's talk about the "flag" controversy. It's a non-issue, like complaining about no hedge monsters in The Shining. There are flags and stars and stripes all over First Man. But, for some reason...for some people...this discerning mature portrait of an American hero succeeds or fails on whether there's a scene of planting the American flag on the Moon (we DO see it, by the way, the flag, I mean). Okay, maybe these "critics" have their priorities (or something) "out of whack," but the filmmakers solved a potential problem that would REALLY get folks up in arms. One of the things that Armstrong revealed in the biography was that when he and Aldrin launched from the Moon's surface, the blast of the engine basically flattened the flag and knocked it to the ground. It wasn't stuck in very well as the astronauts had a hell of a time trying to hammer it deep enough into the clay-like lunar surface to make it anything other than precarious. Maybe nobody should mention it. Maybe those folks should find a way to get there and fix it. Maybe they should take a trip to the Moon.

The second group of selected astronauts responding to a direction to "stare off in the distance."
Armstrong is in the upper-left looking up with his mouth agape.

*****

The ill-fated "Apollo 1" crew—White, Grissom and Chaffee—take a dim view of a model of their Apollo space capsule. At another time, Grissom hung a lemon on the capsule under construction.

 ***

The Armstrong's before NASA: Neil, son Eric, daughter Karen, Janet

Manchester By the Sea

Good Grief!
or
Tough Love, Massachusetts-Style

I giggled in the lobby of the theater after seeing Manchester by the Sea. A matronly patron groused "Well, THAT was the 'feel-good movie of the year!'" And the voice in my head said "It wasn't SUPPOSED to be, you ass!" Then, I laughed. I could have been doing dialog from the movie.

First off, I loved it, it's definitely a highlight of what has been a dispiriting and disappointing year of movies. Part of the reason is that Manchester by the Sea is determined to not do things the usual "movie" (Hollywood) way. For all the touting of "grit" and "realism" in films, there's always a disconnect. People do not talk like writers talk. If anything, the interpretation by the actors "saves" dialog that is too pointed or too "on the nose" to be really reflective of reality. Movie-goers like to have things spelled out—you show them what's going and reinforce it by telling them what they're seeing. That is the typical movie-making way. You fill the audience in, so no one gets left behind, even if you have to beat somebody over the head with a tacked-on "looped" line.

Manchester by the Sea doesn't do that. At times, it comes frustratingly close to going in that direction and then simply...doesn't do it, not meeting expectations or going the easy way. I like that. I felt like the movie was treating me as an adult and that's a rare sensation in movie-going these days. 

But, then my definition of an adult—as opposed to a child—is someone who knows grief.

Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck, absolutely brilliant, but not showy, which will frustrate some) is a live-in handyman for four properties in a suburb of Boston. His life is "getting by". He gets called to solve problems for the tenants in as efficient a way as possible in order to get the job done. He shovels snow on walk-ways before people can fall and break a hip, he'll do plumbing, electrical—all non-union, all skirting code—janitorial. He gets it done. He's responsible. But, he has a low tolerance for bullshit, as he demonstrates with a tenant, who clearly has issues with thinking of things beyond her orbit. Chandler disrespects her and the super gets wind of it and tells him to apologize. This Chandler won't do, reminding the super very matter-of-factly that he's got a very good deal with him as an employee, but no, he's not going to apologize. The super caves "Alright, I'll talk to her!" Lee goes back to work.

But, a phone call throws him off his duties. He gets a call to go back to his home-town, Manchester—his brother's in the hospital. He goes and quickly, but by the time he gets there, his brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) is already dead of heart failure. He talks to the nurse, he talks to the doctor, he talks to family friend, George (C. J. Wilson), who was there when Joe was stricken. Joe had a bad heart, everybody knew it and it just gave out. The doctor expresses his concerns and Lee just brushes it off with a harsh "Fuck this...."

Cut to eight years earlier. A simple cut. No warning, no fade. A single cut to the day Joe is told he has congestive heart failure and has maybe five to ten years to live. "It's a bad disease," says his doctor. "Is there a good disease?" asks Joe. "Poison ivy," she offers. "Athlete's foot," Lee adds. That's the breaking point for Joe's wife (Gretchen Mol), who is trying to deal and she walks out of the room. 

Back to the present, and Lee is escorted to the morgue to see his brother's body. He lingers, unable to speak, leans over his brother's body and kisses him on the cheek. He leaves.

Joe's son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges) is in hockey practice and is having a bad day, when Lee shows up to tell him. Despite facing disciplinary actions for his attitude on the ice, he is allowed to go home with his uncle. "So that's the Lee Chandler," says one of his classmates. "You know, that story is total bullshit..." says another.

Back home at Joe's house, Lee is trying to make arrangements, find a funeral home, and deal with the logistics of his brother's service and burial...and trying to keep an eye on Patrick. Patrick is a diffident teen, and Lee is having a difficult time trying to be a supportive uncle and being there for him like Joe would have. He's unsure and agrees to have Patrick's friends from school come over to help him deal, even...somewhat reluctantly letting Patrick's girlfriend Sylvia stay the night.

But, the two males have a difficult relationship, especially given the difficult times. It's when he drags Patrick along for a meeting with Joe's lawyer that Lee gets his biggest shock: Joe has arranged for Lee to be Patrick's guardian in the event of his death. This floors Lee—financially, Joe has everything set up for Lee to take over (Patrick gets everything and Joe has set up a stipend for Lee to handle things until Patrick turns 21), but it means that Lee will have to uproot what there is of his life and move back to Manchester—which he does not want, nor does he want the responsibility of being Patrick's guardian, all for reasons of his own. Lee has a past there, and his ex-wife (Michelle Williams, who has few scenes but don't be surprised if she wins the Oscar for them) lives there and...well, he just does not want to move back.

This sets up a conflict between uncle and nephew that becomes contentious. Both of them have trouble communicating, anyway—Lee has few words, if any, and Patrick can't help but retort to anything other than derision and sarcasm. Patrick is without a parent, and is old enough that he wants to have a say in his own life, and Lee would just as soon give that to him, but he is legally and responsibly bound to take care of his nephew, who he loves...but....

I hate to cop out at this point, but to say any more will spoil some big reveals that Lonergan inserts at opportune times to show the reasons Lee does what he does, and why. Affleck plays his scenes with an internal intensity that may be off-putting for most audiences, but he's a man in pain and deeply grieving and infects his entire being right down to his soul. He's a man who doesn't trust himself, and doesn't trust the responsibility of taking care of his nephew. He's responsible and it scares him to death.

"Feel-good movie of the year?" Not in the least. But, I deeply loved Manchester by the Sea, which, like Lonergan's You Can Count on Me, feels less like a movie than life, which is messy and you have to pick your way through it, with no easy answers. It's not for everybody. But it certainly is for me.