Denis Villeneuve's Arrival, Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester-by-the-Sea

Making a child die in a picture is a rather ticklish matter; it comes close to an abuse of cinematic power.
--Francoise Truffaut talking to Hitchcock about Sabotage (1936)

Mostly I write about the classical cinema, because when I see a contemporary film it often looks as though D.W. Griffith had never lived.  The Villeneuve and Lonergan films are good examples, drab films about drab people and both depicting deaths of children.  At least I think a child dies in Arrival but the timeline is so screwed up it is rather unclear.  There are two basic kinds of science fiction films:  the violent aliens, e.g., Howard Hawks's The Thing From Another World (1956) and the pseudo-scientific, pseudo-mystical, e.g., Stanley Kubrick's 2001:  A Space Odyssey (1968).  Arrival is very much in the second category, with the alien spaceships looking like the structure at the beginning of the  Kubrick film and the attempt to change our perception of time is portrayed quite murkily in both movies.

Lonergan kills three children in a fire inn Manchester-by-the Sea in a meretricious attempt to explain why blue-collar Lee Chandler (well-played by Casey Affleck) is the mess he is.  Lonergan's condescending film about the working classes and grief in a small town reminds one of Elia Kazan, also a person of the theatre who was good at directing actors (On the Waterfront, 1956) but had little visual style.  Lonergan does use abrupt flashbacks in the middle of scenes, which takes some getting used to but is at least an unusual attempt to relate thoughts of the past to the present. This is only Lonergan's third film, after You Can Count on Me in 2000 and Margaret in 2005, so one hopes he is still learning.  It was interesting to me that Manchester-by-the-Sea is so similar in so many ways to the small town I grew up in the 50's.  Small towns have apparently not changed much.