"Manchester by the Sea" was invested and filmed by Amazon Studios in 2016, written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, by Casey Affleck, Lucas Hedges, Michelle Williams starring in a movie. The film received six nominations at the 89th Academy Awards in 2017 and five nominations at the Golden Globe Awards. Finally won the Academy Award for Best Actor, Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor.
Lee returned to his hometown of Manchester alone after receiving a phone call. The issue of raising his nephew, his brother's funeral, and Lee's past all resurfaced when he returned to his hometown. The most outstanding thing about this film is the story of the script and the acting skills of the actors. Uncle Lee's character is very story-like, and the meticulous design and arrangement of the script is closely connected with this character, creating a "framed" Lee.
1. Who is Uncle Lee?
The protagonist of the film "Manchester by the Sea" is Lee played by Casey Affleck. The director of Lee's character personality did not tell everyone at the beginning, and even gave a lot of character labels and the reactions of the people around him to let the audience. To guess what happened to him before?
As an apartment building maintenance worker, Lee is indifferent to people, does his duty, and even has a good relationship with the opposite sex. Every night is spent alone in a semi-basement room. But after such a character who seemed to have no major problems returned to his hometown, people said that he was "The very one." "The Lee Chandler?" These accents made people curious about this character. Such a small design is necessary, at least in the first half hour of the movie, when the audience is a little confused because of the flashback passages, and the audience's curiosity about Uncle Lee can be maintained so that the characters can be shown little by little.
Uncle Lee is a person who lives in the shadows. The director has designed many scenes in the film to give the audience such hints. Lee is driving back to his hometown. The sun is shining outside the car, but Lee is in the shadows. Lee moved to the basement, his brother and nephew wanted to furnish him, and Lee still only appeared in silhouette.
In the film, LEE is still a person in a frame. In the film, the director designed many insurmountable hurdles in order to imply Lee's inner torment, and designed the character's environment in a fence. Whether it was the beautiful family life before, the supermarket on the night of the fire, or today's Lee looking for someone and a job, the hurdles of life are in front of us, and objects such as pillars are used as the foreground, which makes the field of vision not so broad. Like Lee's life.
For the design concept of Lee in the box, the director used a similar approach in the two important scenes. Lee needs to register information in the hospital to deal with his brother's funeral. There is another scene where Lee is at the police station to recall what happened on the night of the fire. The death of his brother and the fire are two important things that really affected Lee in the past. The composition of the two paragraphs is also similar.
Actor Casey Affleck, who plays Lee, is the younger brother of Oscar-best director Ben Affleck. Before that, he didn't have many works. His brother directed the movie "Missing Baby" starring him, but it was his best work before. Well played, but the characters played are still very different from Lee. Some comments said that the actor played a very facial paralysis, it would be better to say that Casey played a very successful facial paralysis Lee, so that the characters and the environment were well integrated, presenting an unforgettable Lee.
Second, the insurmountable hurdle
If Lee's scene design is often accompanied by many vertical lines in the foreground, it implies that he has worked hard every step of the way. When it entered the state of group play, the vertical line in Lee's scene became the background, and it was even the evidence that he couldn't talk to the world.
The first conversation between Lee and his nephew at home, when the nephew came to ask him for his opinion, he could not enter the role of an elder or a father, and the dialogue between the two was not harmonious, so the two were always talking across a door. . When Lee sent Papa to his mother's house, as shown above, Lee stood in the dark and never crossed the line among the four.
The best scene to use this unreconcilable line is the one where Lee meets his ex-wife, an ordinary intersection, with a newborn in his ex-wife's cart, and they meet like that. The most unforgettable thing about this scene is not just the explosive acting of the leading actors. The director's design of the environment space is also very good, using the vertical line in the corner to highlight the unreconcilable past, until the two say goodbye, this line is always so conspicuous. Of course, the blank space used by the director here is also very good. The ex-wife said, I shouldn't have used such vicious words to say about you. What the ex-wife said before, the director did not show it to us. Among the three scenes deleted by the director, one was the funeral of Lee's children. Lee did not appear at the scene, and the ex-wife cried at the funeral. fall. Therefore, we can only imagine what happened before and after the funeral through the descriptions of the two people. The original incident was not directly exposed to the eyes of the audience, but this implicit method was used to allow everyone to view the incident more objectively. It's not overly sensational, this is a feature that I think a director is very different from a Hollywood director. This method is delicate and just right.
3. The presence of the audience
The director created a sense of alienation in this film, so that the audience did not directly touch the incident, nor did it penetrate deeply into Lee's heart, and deliberately maintained an objective lens so that the audience would always have a sense of The feeling of being there.
In the scene where Lee was driving back to his hometown, the director placed the camera on the back seat, so that the audience was separated from Lee by the foreground, not so close, but he was always present and followed Lee.
The scene where Lee and his nephew Papa met was the first time the director clearly used an objective method. Lee came to inform his nephew that his father had passed away, but the crowd as bystanders could not hear the two at this time. Therefore, the director also left the shot in the panorama composition. This shot is a handheld fixed long shot, which simulates the subjective perspective of bystanders.
In this way, there are still many director designs for scenes that allow the audience to be objectively present and maintain a certain distance. In many fixed shots, the director uses the door as the foreground and increases the depth of field design, so that the actors have enough space to move and make the audience feel that it is not easy to approach.
4. The world outside the window
The window is a very important prop in this film, and it also belongs to the work done by the director in the early design. Not only can we see Manchester through the window, but also Lee's state of mind.
This is a detail that I missed when I watched it for the first time. When I watched it for the second time, I was pleasantly surprised. The conversation between Lee and the lawyer made him feel a lot of pressure. Lee couldn't take responsibility for this. When he looked out of the window, the picture he received was the window, dead branches, and snow as shown on the right, but we can see through the panoramic view that there is another building outside the office, not the one we saw in Lee. Empty view. So the empty scene at this time may be a memory of Lee's past, or it may just be an empty scene added by the director to express the complexity of Lee's mood at this time.
The window is also very obvious in Lee's basement. Both scenes are in the basement. One is that Lee's character who just moved here walks well in the dark. In the distance, there are red flowers outside the window, no matter how beautiful the world is. They were all isolated from his small space. The scene on the right is that Lee is planning to move back to Manchester to live with his nephew. At this time, there is enough light outside to illuminate part of Lee.
The next scene in the scene is when Lee returns to his home in Manchester, breaks the window with his fist, wants to stay and live with his nephew, and Lee blows his breath on the window. Got some relief.
Fives. Where is Manchester?
Manchester is not well-known as an industrial city in the United States, which is different from the prosperity of Manchester in the United Kingdom. Manchester here will feel a little behind. There is Manchester in the title of the film, so I am curious as to why the director chose this story to take place in Manchester.
Manchester is cold and sunny in the director's lens. In the past, there were always aerial scenes such as the sea and forest. In the present time and space, it is indeed snowy. It feels that one time and space happened in summer, another time and space happened in winter, one is the flowing sea, and the other is frozen water. I think it is also because of the obvious contrast between the two seasons in this area, just like the two lives of the protagonist, so the director combined Lee and Manchester.
As for why the movie is named "Manchester by the Sea", I think it should be related to the opening poem. At the beginning of the chapter, Lee read to his nephew this poem "A lot of stuff that he just dones`t understand about the world that I understand that makes--it makes all my actions when I move thought the world. I do things better because I can see it all laid out like map.” (There’s a lot he doesn’t understand about the world, but I understand. So this guides me in the way I do things, and I can do better because in my view It's as clear and clear as a map.) Then he asked his nephew, "Have you seen the map?"
In Lee's life in the past time and space, it can be said that he lived a very happy and clear life, but after the tragedy happened, he himself became the person who couldn't see the map, and couldn't even live in Manchester, and went to the end of the film. Another city worker, the person who can't read the map has become him, and "Manchester by the Sea", like this poem, has become an unspeakable past. Such a poetic title even made me forget to look at the United States. How much relationship Manchester has with Lee. It's not the first time director Kenneth Lonergan has designed a title this way.
The title of the director's second work "Margaret" also comes from a poem the protagonist reads in class that resonates with everyone, rather than the protagonist's name.
six. About the script
"Manchester by the Sea" is director Kenneth Lonergan's third work. His first two directorial works were also written by himself. Generally speaking, they are about some unspeakable mistakes in life that cannot be solved. , so people can only continue to live the story.
As a director, Kenneth Lonergan made the audio-visual of "Manchester by the Sea" very meaningful, and as a screenwriter he is even better, especially in the two time-space constructed in this film, which intersect and overlap, The changes in the hearts of the characters are gradually enriched with the plot. Won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay Award, Kenneth did not narrate the protagonist's experience as a gimmick and sensational point, but used a two-line narrative method to outline Lee's past through his memories step by step. come out. The passages of the past time and space developed from positive emotions to the occurrence of the tragedy of the fire, but the beginning of the current time and space is from the death of his brother to the fact that Lee wants to pick up himself and start a new life. Such falling and rising emotions are edited alternately, making The mood of the film is well neutralized.
This is a kind of emotional secrecy tempered by narrative sparseness. The past is perfectly connected to the future, and it is impossible to tell if it is left blank.
seven. music in video
The music for the film is roughly a sonata for oboe and piano, some Massenet chorus, and Lesley Barber's score.
The 8-minute paragraph on the night of the fire is one of the most shocking paragraphs in the film. The director chose Albinoni's soft version in G minor here. This is the saddest song in the world with two time-space Lees. Edit back and forth to make this paragraph go straight to the heart of the person.
The whole film is full of sadness. In order to let everyone feel the change in Lee's mood, the director wants to start a new life with his nephew, and has a yearning for the future. When Lee is the only scene in the present time and space with a smile , the director added a song called "I begining to see the light", the song is cheerful and comfortable, like returning to the childhood of my nephew.
The director said in an interview, "These musical pieces have little to do with the human element in this story, it's just about the beauty of the world that continues to be above us and around us, no matter how things change. Sometimes in To a certain extent, it will feel cold, and sometimes it will feel very persistent and warm." In any case, the director chose to design the soundtrack with a correlation instead of the usual causal relationship, making the poetic expression of the film more romantic. .
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