Death!
But not just any death; death that feels personal.
The kind of death you do grieve.
The grief that lasts a lifetime and never seems to reach its end.
Just like this movie.
I want to believe that this film was as excruciatingly long precisely to help me recreate such sense of unsolvable emptiness.
But none of these thoughts sank right away inside of me. Only a Ray Charles´ masterpiece buried as background on one of the initial movie scenes, “Oh What A Beautiful Morning”, and the certainty that Manchester by the Sea had been overrated by its viewers.
I was mostly angry at the kind of relationship between uncle and nephew, at their lack of respect for each other, at the feeling of strandedness, at the contained fury in each of them, and at the oppressive lack of more words in it.
But as the movie finished and I went to Youtube searching for the song I had liked so much that the memories of my own personal loss slowly began coming to me, reminding me of the vast number of similitudes: the wish to not exist anymore, the fury that is more than mere rage, the frustration, the incapacity to stay still, the “let´s not think”, the “let´s numb ourselves” with music, with friends, with booze, with sex; the “let´s comfort” the ones supposedly there to comfort us, the need to run away of it all, to disappear, to never return, and the not being able to cope.
And suddenly I found myself back at ease.
That´s how I know this movie was exquisite.