For the week of February 20th, Lionsgate Home Entertainment is bringing the Academy Award-nominated Manchester by the Sea to Blu-ray. In films like You Can Count On Me and his alternatively frustrating/magnificent teenage epic Margaret, writer-director Kenneth Lonergan has expressed such a precise, nuanced sense of human foibles under pressure (unsurprisingly, he got his start as an award-winning playwright), and Manchester by the Sea feels like the clearest representation of this quality (you could make the case for it as his best film, if you wanted to). If the setup feels familiar - after learning that his brother (a wonderful Kyle Chandler) has died, janitor Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck, giving the best performance of the year) has to return to his hometown to assume custody of his teenage nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges, who's every bit Affleck's equal) - the execution is anything but. We might expect that this will be a film about these two broken-hearted people forging a family of their own, except Lonergan knows that real people are too unpredictable to fit into any feel-good homilies that premise might suggest. No, he's more interested in trauma: the ways people overcome it and - more importantly - the ways they don't. Lee has demons following him since long before his brother died, and his interactions with Patrick only force him into a place that he might never be willing to emotionally accept. So many scenes have the uncomfortable intimacy of real life: Patrick having a panic attack over something as small as a frozen chicken; Lee's bleary-eyed, heartbreaking conversation inside a police station; a devastating late-film reunion between Lee and his ex-wife (Michelle Williams, who might be winning an Oscar next week for her work in this one scene). It's a lot to take, and I get why people find the film so depressing. Yet that claim also feels reductive, given Lonergan's understanding that people also act kinda ridiculous when they're miserable. As such, Lonergan mines a not-insignificant amount of comedy from the proceedings - the gallows humor of Lee's day job, for example, or the many sexual complications from Patrick's insistence on trying (and poorly, I might add) to manage two different girlfriends (Moonrise Kingdom's Kara Hayward and Anna Baryshnikov, daughter of Mikhail) at the same time. It's times like these that we're reminded Lonergan also had a hand in scripting Harold Ramis' underrated Analyze This, except there's no whiff of sitcom convention: the mingling of humor and horror feels honest to the greater human condition. If I have any issue with Manchester by the Sea, it's that as skilled a writer and director-of-actors as Lonergan is, his overall aesthetic touch leaves a little to be desired. There's a flatness to his images (the craft on display ranks with a competently made HBO movie), and while not every film needs to be as virtuosic as, say, Moonlight is, Lonergan struggles to convey the atmospheric richness of his New England locales. Certain scenes even evince some technical carelessness - I'm thinking of a key hospital scene where Lonergan skips back and forth over the 180-degree line with no real rhyme or reason. Still, it's a minor quibble, and one that fades as the film peaks in emotional intensity. A vital piece of work.
Jeffrey Kauffman wrote that "it's to Lonergan's credit that there really aren't any tonal inconsistencies in the presentation, despite an unavoidably dour and melancholic feeling that wafts through much of the film. Flashbacks intrude in a kind of fragmented way, offering insight into happier times and relationships that seem downright healthy, including those between Lee and his wife Randi (Michelle Williams). It's not hard to draw some kind of conclusion from the fact that the contemporary timeframe shows Lee desperately alone and isolated, and again hints of some unspeakable sadness tend to inform many scenes ostensibly about something else, like the veritable elephant in the room. An unmistakable ostracization of Lee by various people makes it clear that Lee's history has taken a decided detour somewhere along the way, but, again, Lonergan merely teases the audience for a while, before delivering what is an undeniably horrifying revelation (which won't be spoiled here). While the sadness underlying not just Joe's death but Lee's own history is an unavoidable part of the emotional ambience of [the film], the real through line in the film is actually the establishment of a working relationship between Lee and Patrick. Here the film shows the halting, tamped down manner of these northeastern males, probably circumscribed by their own self imposed notions of "masculinity", something that is only further hobbled by either an inability or unwillingness to articulate what's going on inside their hearts. While that male bonding provides a lot of developmental angles, probably the single biggest burst of emotion comes courtesy of a brief, heart wrenching scene between Lee and Randi, one which again highlights Lee's stumbling way with trying to express himself (something that probably only adds to the angst of the moment)."
Given my distaste for writer/director Tom Ford's A Single Man, I wasn't expecting to like Nocturnal Animals (which arrives on Blu-ray courtesy of Universal Studios Home Entertainment) as much as I do. Ford's love of operatic melodramatics and swoony visuals turned that 2009 drama into a shallow examination of glittering surfaces rather than the wrenching psychological study it should have been. Nocturnal Animals is also all surface, but intentionally so - Ford's protagonists are so numb to the world that they barely function as anything other than a series of beautiful, hollow poses. Chief among these automatons is Susan Morrow (Amy Adams, in the second of her two great 2016 performances), a struggling art-gallery owner who regards the most distressing of circumstances (her business is cratering; her husband - Armie Hammer, who's practically playing a Ken Doll - is too contemptuous to hide his many infidelities) with an eerie remove. It takes a manuscript from her ex-husband (Jake Gyllenhaal) to jolt Susan from her ennui, and this device lets Ford stage his boldest narrative/thematic gambit. From the moment Susan starts to read, we bounce back and forth between her perspective and the story on the page, a lurid little fiction about a beleaguered family man (also Gyllenhaal) whose chance encounter with a repulsive Texan psycho (Aaron Taylor-Johnson, giving the best performance of his career) sends him on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. These scenes play like Death Wish for The New Yorker crowd (another way of putting it: if Jim Thompson wrote L'Avventura), so artfully staged and composed is the chaos (big props to Seamus McGarvey's widescreen cinematography and Abel Korzeniowski's Bernard Herrmann-riff of a score). We even get a full-fledged Movie Star Turn from the great Michael Shannon, playing a taciturn, cancer-ridden detective whose commitment to meting out justice leads Nocturnal Animals into its most morally ambiguous territory. Eventually, Susan can't wait to ditch her own problems and return to the brutal thriller mechanics on display, and we're no better, and it's then that Ford has snared us. Without going into too many spoilers, Ford is interested in illustrating nothing less than the power of literature itself, which he sees as swift and as lacerating as a scalpel (the central and wholly unsubtle visual metaphor: when Susan first touches the manuscript, she gets a papercut). As the novel makes Susan reflect on her former life with her ex, we start drawing all sorts of uneasy parallels between the emotional violence she's wrecked with the physical violence on the page (parallels that Ford encourages, whether it's casting Gyllenhaal in a duel role or using Adams' doppelganger Isla Fisher to play Book Gyllenhaal's doomed wife), all which culminate in a diabolically abrupt ending. Two months ago, I couldn't decide if the end was infuriating or brilliant; now, I'm leaning towards the latter. Nocturnal Animals is certainly not for everyone. It's an intellectual exercise, to say the least, and a particularly merciless one at that (the only person you really care about is Shannon's flawed, noble cop, and I credit the actor more than Ford's ability to generate empathy on screen). That said, it's such a strange, singular piece of work that it achieves a chilly integrity. I suspect this one is a cult classic in the making.
That probably won't be the case for Broad Green and Miramax's long-belated Bad Santa sequel. The first Bad Santa is one of the great American comedies; fourteen years later, there's still nothing quite like it, a unique blend of graphic language (thank the Coen Brothers, who performed a brilliant page-one rewrite of the film's dialogue), holiday farce, and genuine pathos that plays like the long-lost collaboration of Preston Sturges farce and David Mamet. It should have been a glorious one-off, yet here's the sequel, which jockeys with Zoolander No. 2 for the title of "Most Inessential Follow-up to An Otherwise Beloved Classic." The plot is, unfortunately, almost the same as the first - mired in a depressive tailspin, alcoholic mall Santa/safecracker Willie Soke (Billy Bob Thornton, phoning it in) reteams with his duplicitous former partner Marcus (Tony Cox) for one last score - and that's the first sign that something is afoot. Bad Santa 1 delivered a perfect, coal-black happy ending that suggested its repellent characters were capable of change (however small), so to see most of that walked back almost immediately compromises the rest of the picture. What deviations that follow are cosmetic in nature: a now-adult (but no less addled) Thurman Merman (Brett Kelly, who seems far more self-aware of how ridiculous his character is, to the detriment of the film), a different hottie who's inexplicably attracted to Willie (Christina Hendricks, replacing Lauren Graham), another officious stooge snooping around Willie (Ryan Hansen, who doesn't even begin to fill the shoes of the late, great pairing of John Ritter and Bernie Mac), and the introduction of Willie's equally dissolute mother (Kathy Bates). On the subject of this last development: as funny as Bates is (she's a consummate pro), she's playing just a female riff on Willie, so nothing she does really surprises us, narratively or otherwise. The whole endeavor just feels so slight, which is a rejection of Bad Santa's most enduring quality. That first film works so well because director Terry Zwigoff takes Willie's depression seriously - he (and Thornton) always foreground the misery and self-loathing at the heart of the character, both of which make the laughs sadder and more brutal than they have any right to be (it's a film where the appearance of a poorly whittled, blood-soaked wooden pickle can actually make you cry). By comparison, director Mark Waters is only interested in being as smutty as possible, yet while the dialogue might be even more graphic, it's got the cumulative impact of an exceptionally dirty Two and a Half Men episode. I guess Bad Santa 2 has the edge over the Zoolander sequel, if only because Thornton in half-assed mode is more compelling than nothing, but even his presence doesn't warrant a viewing. Rewatch the original and call it a day.
Finally, the Criterion Collection is bringing Michael Curtiz's 1945 noir melodrama Mildred Pierce to Blu-ray. For anyone who's only familiar with this story through James M. Cain's 1941 novel or the 2011 Todd Haynes miniseries, you're in for a treat. This Mildred Pierce is one of the most satisfying studio films to come out of the 1940s, in part because of Curtiz and his peerless craftsmanship. Curtiz was a journeyman before that word had a bad rap. He could do romance (Casablanca); he could do high adventure (The Adventures of Robin Hood); he could pivot to raw patriotism (Yankee Doodle Dandy) or gangster movies (Angels with Dirty Faces), too, if need be. So it goes with Mildred Pierce, which might be his most tonally sophisticated film. Cain's source material was a grim character study about a Depression-era housewife (Joan Crawford) whose efforts to better her life crumble in proximity to a vain lover (the sneering Zachary Scott) and a monstrously selfish daughter (Ann Blyth). That premise lends itself to the popular "women's pictures" of the 1930s and 1940s (Now, Voyager, Dark Victory) and Curtiz adroitly handles this element - he gets the normally histrionic Crawford to deliver a performance of real nuance and depth, particularly whenever she and Blyth are sparking off one another. But Curtiz's real masterstroke is to bring in elements of film noir. His Mildred Pierce begins with a murder that isn't in the book and then flashes back to Mildred's tortured story, a move that makes Mildred Pierce function as a proto-Sunset Boulevard. Far from sensationalizing an already melodramatic story, the murder and its fallout intensify the stakes: Mildred becomes even more tragic (and her struggles all the more desperate) because we know it all ends in blood and tears. As such, this film version bests even Cain, and credit to Curtiz for blending everything he knew about genre filmmaking into such a seamless Hollywood concoction.
Svet Atanasov writes that "the entire film is like a giant puzzle whose key pieces can be arranged in a number of different ways. Eventually its story - the majority of which is told via various uneven flashbacks - is wrapped up with a logical finale, but before it there are multiple twists that could have easily been used to accomplish the same...The resolution is hardly surprising but the events leading up to the murder are presented in ways that make it impossible not to ponder a number of different scenarios. The true strength of the film, however, comes from the excellent characterizations as they basically eclipse the mystery and push the film in an entirely new direction (critics frequently and easily place the film in the noir column, but such profiling essentially ignores all of its other strong qualities that make it equally effective as an uncompromising critique of the American class system and values). Crawford's performance is impressive but to single her out as the star of the film is rather unfair. Scott and Bennett are equally good and Blyth looks like she was born to play the spoiled daughter. Jack Carson also leaves a lasting impression as the pushy womanizer Wally Fay."