MovieRob’s Birthday Bash of Favorites 2020 (#27 of 47) – Manchester By the Sea (2016) – Encore Review 3

January is my birthday month, so I decided that I would try and do something quite unique and special for this milestone in my life. I will be turning 46, so I decided to watch 47 (46+1 for good luck) of my all time favorite movies in a random order over the course of this month. I have reviewed every one of these films already, but I will now give new perspectives on them all. Every one of these films received a 10/10 scoring from me. Some of these reviews will contain spoilers so if you have never seen them before, I recommend that you read some of my previous reviews of the film that were spoiler free before reading on…

Hope you enjoy!

This is film #27 of the 47.

Let’s continue with… Manchester By the Sea (2016)

Initial Viewing Memories – Heard so many great things about this film during the 2016 award season and highly anticipated seeing this slow churning yet very poignant film.

“Who you gonna shoot, you or me?” – Patrick

Number of Times Seen – 4 (22 Jan 2017, 2 Mar 2017, 7 Jan 2018 and 15 Jan 2020)

Link to original review – Here, Here and Here

Brief Synopsis – Following the sudden death of his brother, a man must try and deal with taking care of his teenage nephew despite having trouble dealing with a previous tragedy that occurred a few years earlier.

My Take on it – Amazing movie that is able to create such a deep understanding of how tragedy can affect someone on so many levels.

Casey Affleck is superb in the lead role and truly makes us believe the complex issues of his character.

He deservingly won an Oscar and Golden Globe for his work here which is so powerful.

The story written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan is extremely layered and allows us to slowly get a clear understanding of everything that this character must face in the present, in his past and ultimately in his future and the fact that he has so much trouble with it all says so much about how people deal differently with the events of their lives because some are able to find ways to overcome the difficulties while others cannot.

It’s quite hard to imagine many other actors being able to tackle such a role on such an emotional level that things ooze out of the screen to a point where we feel his pain and sympathize with the things that he tries to deal with.

The cold winter atmosphere of the story adds so much more to the depth of the story and helps make things even more powerful because we get to see how even the weather can affect how one looks at certain situations along the way.

This is among the very best character driven stories ever shot because it gives us such a unique perspective on it all while allowing us to really feel this character’s pain and burden along the way without the need of pulling any punches.

This film was also nominated for Best Picture, but it is too dark of a film to have been able to prevail there despite it being the most powerful of the nominated films that year.

MovieRob’s Favorite Trivia – According to an interview with Kenneth Lonergan on DP/30, the idea for the film didn’t originate with him – the main core of a character going back home to take care of a family member after a death was pitched to Lonergan by Matt Damon and John Krasinski as a script that Lonergan would write and for Damon to direct; but, due to scheduling conflicts with The Martian (2015), Damon couldn’t direct the film or star in it. (He was considered for the role of Lee that Casey Affleck was cast in.) Lonergan was then given free rein as a writer-director for the project, with Damon as producer. (From IMDB)

Rating – Oscar Worthy (10/10) (no change from original review)