Anesthesia (2015)

Score: 2.5 / 5

The thing about ensemble dramas is that we love them. Even when they're not great, we get pulled in by the talent and hope the movie works too. Tim Blake Nelson tries again here to be the writer and director of a sprawling film highlighting the interconnected nature of human life, and this time he assembles the cast to make it worth a watch. It's just too bad his work doesn't provide a better foundation for them.

It would seem that Anesthesia might concern a feeling of numbness in modern life, a sort of artificial coping mechanism to deal with the pains of our existence. To some extent, Nelson's film does explore those ideas. We have a philosophy professor (Sam Waterston) preparing for retirement and contemplating his life's work as he aims for purpose- or intent-driven behaviors and one of his students (Kristen Stewart) who harms herself. We have an alcoholic housewife (Gretchen Mol) and mother of two trying to be the picture-perfect school mom, though her husband (Corey Stoll) is having an affair somewhere in town. We have an intelligent but failed writer (Nelson himself) and his children who are all fighting different addictions while his wife confronts cancer. It's a messy ensemble, and the actors fir their parts perfectly, performing with conviction and passion.

But though they're all trying to anesthetize themselves, Nelson does the exact opposite for us, plucking our heartstrings with wild abandon and forcing us to feel every little sting. Uncomfortably funny but comically sad, the whole enterprise feels underbaked. Contrived at best, the plot feels like Crash but cheaper and simpler and with a thesaurus. Waxing philosophic at every turn, the film meanders with a nihilistic goal, as its various themes of coming of age, addiction, fatality, depression, purpose, fidelity, and of course DEATH get pounded into our ears. Waterston carries the real weight here along with Stewart, as they deliver lengthy, complex monologues about the pains and purposes of life.

While I ordinarily like this heavy, heady stuff, here there is so little dramatic meat to feast on that the monologues feel gimmicky and cruel, a cerebral venture without focus. It tries so hard to make us empathize with its characters, but ultimately the film doesn't let us know much about the characters beyond their spotlight moments of revelation. They quickly become archetypes, caricatures of experimental teens, troubled spouses, struggling addicts, and none of them stick in your mind once the credits start rolling. One character refers to an "echo chamber", and that is an unfortunate but apt description of this film.

IMDb: Anesthesia

Manchester by the Sea (2016)

Score: 5 / 5

Manchester by the Sea, easily one of the forerunners of this awards season, is also one of the most human movies of the last year. Writer and director Kenneth Lonergan has crafted a unique emotional adventure and executes his vision with profound compassion and integrity. It's an odyssey into the soul of one lone man, reserved and tortured, who finds himself the unwitting guardian of his nephew after tragedy strikes. It's a brooding picture of what happens when life dumps on you far more than your fair share, and yet it's anything but a dark journey. Rather, it's an uncommonly wise maze of love and anger and humor and anxiety, leading to our experience of intoxicating tenderness.

Seconded only by Moonlight -- and by no other film in recent memory -- this film's awareness of modern American masculinity is precise and absorbing, a mystery to delve into as the film progresses yet never fully solve. Trapped by the constraints of their culture, these men harbor intense desires and ideas they cannot always pursue or express. The film revolves around the incredible performance of Casey Affleck as protagonist Lee, quiet and withdrawn until he lashes out at the perceived injustices of his environment. Haunted by his past mistakes regarding his late children and ex-wife, Lee maneuvers through yet more tragedy with little grace and even less surety. Lonergan keeps us adrift for quite some time, in the same boat as our leading man, and as the impact of the film finally grips us, we realize that we aren't hungry for the usual recipe. This is an experience of life on screen we almost never see, and Affleck's performance is a reminder of what makes screen acting a great art form.

Consider, too, brother Joe, whose will entrusts his son Patrick to Lee, a decision apparently never brought before Lee himself. And Patrick himself, we see more as the film unfolds, battles his own demons, though his are largely the product of adolescence. The film shines most as Lee and Patrick live and learn together, bouncing off each other with better timing and emotional connection than you see between two men in just about anything since Abbott and Costello. Remarkably touching and sincere, fast and occasionally unbearably funny, the banter between the two is endearing and steals the show.

Showcased by these two men, but present in other exchanges as well, is Lonergan's delicious writing style, a chorus of awkward exchanges and lengthy silences that are at once infuriating and rapturous, far more honest and revealing than any amount of cohesive dialogue. This verbal style, when married to a similar visual style, makes the audience work almost as hard as the artists, keeping our minds reeling as we try to link motifs and hearts, filling in the blanks before the tide comes back in. The film's thematics, I suspect, might be found somewhere in that, but I was too infatuated with the painstaking observations of the film to climb its heightened reaches. The film has an astounding sense of place (not unlike, perhaps, a Coen brothers film, only less stylized), an awareness that keeps everything fiercely grounded. Even scene by scene, as Lonergan starts us in dramatically familiar territory and then launches us overboard into uncharted waters, we never feel unbalanced or bewildered, because we know exactly where we are, why, and how our heart is aching.

It's a beautiful movie. Do your soul a favor and go soak it in.

IMDb: Manchester by the Sea