Review of Manchester by the Sea (2016) by Axgrinder — 22 Dec 2016

This is an extremely dark movie. Critics love it because it doesn’t go for the happy ending. Casey Affleck will likely win an Oscar for Best Actor. Affleck plays an average lower-middle working-class guy living in a small coastal fishing town.

Michelle Williams (who is probably too pretty to be believable for the part) plays his wife, and they have three young kids. Affleck is a happy guy with zero aspirations in life and spends his free time boating, drinking with his buddies and dabbling in recreational drugs.

The movie would have you believe that many people live this kind of life, and that most can get away with living a sloppy and ambitionless life without consequences but, in the dice game of life, Affleck takes a stupid gamble and rolls snake eyes.

He becomes a haunted and angry individual who moves to Boston and ekes out a living as a janitor. Several years later, his older brother dies and names Affleck the guardian of his high-school age son.

This could have been a movie about redemption. (It’s the obvious ending choice, and you will find yourself hoping for it, rooting for it.) Instead, you get a cautionary tale about broken people. Those who like this movie use a lot of adjectives to describe it like: "heartbreaking, genuine and powerful.

" It is all those things but, it’s also a movie without hope. The ending is sudden and abrupt like a cold slap in the face, a lump of coal in your Christmas stocking, or discovering the Grinch in your living room instead of Santa Claus.

If you're looking for holiday cheer, you might want to go see something else.