Well, finally got around to watching this, and I'm happy to say that my reservations turned out to be unwarranted. It's a very fine film, with a really terrific performance by Affleck that is the best I've seen all year without a close second that I can think of offhand. It's a great role, obviously, but it's also easy to imagine a hundred actors playing this character in a hundred different ways, but without the subtlety and lived-in, natural feeling that Affleck brings. I appreciated the way it extended sympathy to a lot of different characters, without setting its main character in opposition to everyone else. The film as a whole is very well-crafted, even if some of the dialogue seems to be straining a little too hard for authenticity (or maybe I should say that it's fuckin' strainin' a little too hard for some of that fuckin' authenticity bullshit).
I think these comments by Glenn Kenny are off the mark:
Glenn Kenny wrote:...the more I am asked to acknowledge the "tragedy" of a self-centered alcoholic who is offered an opportunity to be of genuine service to others, and instead opts to go back to his self-imposed sty of self pity, the less inclined I am to see it as tragedy, and more inclined I am to see it as defensive indulgence. So there. Also, there's the way the film neatly sidesteps issues of both moral and legal responsibility, the better to let the viewer experience all that emotion. My friend A.O. Scott raised some eyebrows in his Times review when he said it would be a mistake to deny that the movie had a racial dimension but it certainly does. I myself was reminded of the Lou Whitney song "Thirty Days in the Workhouse," the chorus of which goes "I got thirty days in the workhouse/now don't you shed no tears/'cause if I'd been a black man/they'd have given me thirty years." As Jerry Lee Lewis likes to say, think about it.
A couple of things here:
1) He comes dangerously close to saying that Affleck's character does not deserve his sympathy, which strikes me as tacky at best. It's one thing to say that the movie is unsuccessful in generating that sympathy, but that doesn't seem to be what Kenny's saying here. Rather, he seems to be saying that a character with this arc is simply not worth the trouble. This implies heavily that he's simply not willing to meet the movie on its own terms, but rather that he's checked out because the character doesn't behave as he wishes him to behave. Plus, of course, it just seems needlessly judgmental in moral terms.
2) I don't want to pull Stephen Colbert's "color blind" bit here, and I love A.O. Scott, but Scott's comments about the racial dynamics of the movie (which Kenny endorses) say a lot more about Scott than it does the film. It didn't occur to me that two of the tenants in the opening Boston scenes were black, or that it would be significant if they were, or especially that this somehow puts Lee in a subservient position out of self-loathing. It strikes me as bizarre that someone would read this into the movie without any more context than what we are given. Frankly, I think someone has to have race on the brain for that to occur to them in the first place; people tend to see what they want to see, and in this case it seems a little ugly.
Still, while I admired the film, there's something a little limited about its ambitions and hence its impact. It's about ... a guy who's sad because something sad happened to him. That's really all it is, and while it's well-made and affecting, it for the most part sticks to mining some pretty obvious emotional territory. I don't think it moves past that sadness into anything more profound or more challenging, and for that reason, I suspect it won't stick with me over the long term. For all its sadness, it just doesn't cut very deep.
