Steinfeld’s angst shines in ‘Edge’ – Lonergan’s ‘Manchester’ roundly pegged as Oscar favorite

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In this Sept 10, 2016 photo, Hailee Steinfeld, a cast member in the film ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ poses for a portrait at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Toronto. The film opens nationwide on Nov 18. (AP)
In this Sept 10, 2016 photo, Hailee Steinfeld, a cast member in the film ‘The Edge of Seventeen’ poses for a portrait at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Toronto. The film opens nationwide on Nov 18. (AP)
When’s the last time you saw a truly fresh talent on screen? Someone so charismatic that you couldn’t wait to find out who they are, what they’ve done before and why you’ve never noticed? That’s what it feels like to watch Hayden Szeto as the sweetly dorky love interest to Hailee Steinfeld’s lead in “The Edge of Seventeen”, a charmingly sardonic coming-of-age story from the promising writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig in her feature debut.

There are other reasons to go see “The Edge of Seventeen”, of course. Szeto, a relative newcomer, is just one of them. He actually has a fairly small part. But it’s the kind of introduction to a should-be star that’s not to be missed. Also, that the small “love interest” role had such an impact is a testament to the care with which this movie was put together. From the first shot of a grungy maroon sedan door splattered with mud screeching to a halt outside of a high school where our heroine Nadine (Steinfeld) informs her teacher (a terrific Woody Harrelson) that she plans to kill herself, it’s clear that this is no sanitized high school nostalgia trip. It’s a movie with a bite and one for the people who would never actually want to go back to that part of life.

Nadine (Steinfeld) is a sarcastic, often inappropriate, occasionally blue and perpetually aggrieved young woman who exists on the peripheries of the high school ecosystem. It’s been this way since childhood for her, and hasn’t been helped by the fact that her brother Darian (Blake Jenner) is at the top of the social ladder. He’s handsome and popular and good at sports and would probably be real annoying if it weren’t for the fact that he’s also a decent, kind person who seems to have his head on straight.

But he’s the bane of Nadine’s existence, and just a consistent reminder how other she is. It certainly doesn’t help when her best friend Krista (Haley Lu Richardson) takes up with her brother, but that pivotal moment does send her into a story-propelling spiral of action, screw-ups and self-discovery.

There is, of course, the perpetual problem in the Hollywood treatment of high school outcast stories whereby we’re asked to believe that beautiful movie stars are capable of being invisible, but “The Edge of Seventeen” even does a reasonable job making us buy into Nadine’s apartness. She had some unfortunate skin and haircuts when she was younger and never quite got comfortable with kids her own age. Sure, she can throw down with her mom, her brother, her teacher and her friend, but at a party with peers, she slinks out to the porch alone where another loner likens her to the Danny DeVito in “Twins.”

Empathetic

Steinfeld carries the movie effortlessly, walking that fine line of making a somewhat bratty, entitled and self-absorbed character endearing, funny and even empathetic. Her comedic timing is first-rate and reminiscent of Emma Stone’s star-turn in “Easy A” just a few years ago.

Sure, some of it is cliche, and Nadine’s troubled relationship with her widowed mother (Kyra Sedgwick) is underdrawn for the amount of emotional depth the movie seems to be wanting the audience to glean from it. Perhaps it should have stayed lighter. But “The Edge of Seventeen” also has enough good that it might just become a new classic in the high school comedy genre.

“The Edge of Seventeen”, a STX Entertainment release, is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America for “sexual content, language and some drinking — all involving teens.” Running time: 104 minutes. Three stars out of four.

The filmmaker and playwright Kenneth Lonergan, a self-described “ultra-naturalist” whose eloquently empathic stories tremble with the richness of daily life, began his writing career, surprisingly, awash in science fiction.

He was (and still is) a die-hard Trekkie. He has seen “2001: A Space Odyssey” more than 50 times, he estimates. One of his early plays (unproduced so far) is about two spacemen spinning through the universe for years after their ship was disintegrated. Lonergan would lead Matthew Broderick, his best friend since high-school, from their Upper West Side neighborhood to the Ziegfeld Theatre to see “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” “He liked to sit about two or three rows back and just get blasted by it”, recalls Broderick.

Lonergan’s plays and films, talky and naturalistic, employ nothing like Spielbergian grandeur. But they can nevertheless, on a purely human scale, just as surely overpower in their fullness of life, in their warm, melancholic intimacy.

“Life is full of very interesting, small details that usually get skipped over for the sake of economy”, Lonergan, rumpled and genial, said in a recent interview in Soho, not far from where he lives with his wife, the actress J. Smith-Cameron and their 10-year-old daughter. “And those little details dictate all sorts of things in life. When I skip over them, there’s not much left.”

That sensitive eye has made Lonergan, 54, one of the most celebrated playwrights of his generation, and a figure of cultish ardor for his first two films: the luminous sibling drama “You Can Count on Me” and the ambitious New York masterwork “Margaret.” The latter was embroiled for years in a law suit and disagreements with the distributor, Fox Searchlight, and received only the scantest of theatrical releases. Lonergan’s favored longer edit has steadily gained in stature.

Now, cinematic redemption is at hand. Lonergan’s new film, “Manchester by the Sea” (in theaters Friday), is already one of the most acclaimed movies of the year, roundly pegged as an Oscar favorite. It stars Casey Affleck as a janitor whose brother’s death returns him to his Massachusetts fishing village hometown, a homecoming that resurfaces a trauma from the past. His brother’s will names him guardian of a teenage son.

The film, toggling between the past and present, runs on two rails at once, leading to a heartbreaking portrait of a tragedy’s long, unshakable shadow.

“I was a little chagrined to work on it because these things have happened to real people, and worse, and you sometimes wonder if you have any right to be making it into a fun story for people to compliment you on”, says Lonergan with a chuckle. “Then I figured why not, it’s worth talking about, it’s worth trying to look at and be truthful about and respectful of.” (AP)

The idea of the film was first brought to Lonergan by Matt Damon (who co-stars in “Margaret”) and John Krasinski. They hoped Lonergan would write it and Damon would direct and star. Time passed and schedules got complicated, and ultimately Lonergan took up directing, too, with Damon (now a producer) handing the role to his longtime friend, Affleck. It was, to a certain extent, a lifeline out of the debilitating saga — the “unrelenting difficulties”, Lonergan says — of “Margaret.”

“I certainly saw the value in giving him a good job, but my motives were probably far more selfish than that”, says Damon. “He’s my favorite writer.”

“Manchester by the Sea” drew raves at its Sundance Film Festival premiere, where Amazon plunked down $10 million for distribution rights. Being the toast of Hollywood would put some in the mood for celebration. Not Lonergan.

“He’s a curmudgeon, as everyone says”, says Broderick. “Kenny said, ‘I don’t know if I feel good because I improved myself and I feel better or if it’s because everyone’s telling me I’m great.’ That definitely doesn’t hurt. As we get older, you can really appreciate this is a wonderful time for him and he should enjoy it. And he should use it to make whatever he wants.”

Affleck, who starred in a London production of Lonergan’s “Youth in Revolt”, describes Lonergan as allergic to sentimentality and artificial convention.

“He talks about the characters like they’re friends of yours you’ve known your whole life”, says Affleck. “It just seems like human beings and at the end you’re sobbing and you’re not sure why because people have just been fighting about whether to order pizza or not. It’s a magic trick.”

Lonergan, though, is less mystical about his process. When he gets stuck, he says, he tries to think pragmatically about his characters, the way an actor might. Did she have dinner yet? Would she have needed to make that phone call? Some of the scenes in “Manchester by the Sea” came out of Lonergan simply driving up and down Cape Ann to figure out how his characters would have gotten around.

“I’ve always just tried as hard as I could to do whatever was necessary to access whatever secrets that I didn’t know about that were inside of me”, says Lonergan. “You do certain steering of that. But mostly what I hope is you’re like: ‘That would be cool.’ And you don’t know why and you don’t ask why.”

How does he steer himself? Lonergan smiles. “I don’t know. I’ve forgotten how.” (AP)

By Lindsey Bahr

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