This is written for people who have already seen the film. Holding the audience captive in suspense as to what is the dark beyond in the main character's life does nothing. It slows down the movie and makes it tedious. When writers contrive these flashback-to-present scenes, it has to have a big payoff, or what's the point? In general, telling this story mostly chronologically would have served the pacing and sense of the film much better. After an hour or so into the film we finally know 'what happened' and finally we can really just watch the movie. The movie is about how a guy recovers from a tragedy by facing the prospect of becoming his nephew's guardian. But you don't get to be in on that until it's almost too late. It's stupid. The relationship between the uncle and nephew does turn out to be quite interesting and worth watching once you get there. Before then it's a conceptual writer's device to jump back and forth in time to somehow make the movie more suspenseful or something. Once the tragedy is revealed the movie becomes much more cohesive and for me, a pleasure to watch. Overall I think it is good, it's just perplexing as to why writers go to such great lengths to invent concepts that don't serve to tell the story well. Being artistic is mistaken for contriving conception. Oh well. It's still pretty good, with solid acting compensating for writer/director ego.
Review of Manchester by the Sea
