Hoping to reclaim who she was before marriage and children, Joan retreats to Cape Cod rather than follow her husband to Kansas. There she embarks upon a quest to set herself free.
"Year by the Sea" is for audiences who don't trust the shiftiness of nuance and craft, of messages that rise up from dramatic situations rather than being pasted on top of them, and who would prefer their life lessons stated loudly ...
[Year by the Sea] is not a film trying to show the extraordinary in the mundane, but rather create a space for characters like Joan to figure out what they can become.
A quiet movie, as it should be. Joan finds herself because she slows down and listens to her own needs and wants, to nature and the day-to-day rhythms of the village she's become a temporary part of.
Instead of a hearty chowder of emotional highs and lows, first-time director Alexander Janko, who also adapted the script, settles for a diluted, Campbell's-Soup version of getting one's groove back.
The Patriot Ledger
September 24, 2017
"Sea" is little more than a lame excuse for good actors to embarrass themselves by uttering eye-rolling bromides about aging gracefully.
The characters in the self-discovery melodrama Year by the Sea are in danger of drowning -- not in the cold North Atlantic waters, but in the tidal wave of maritime metaphors unleashed by the script.
The dialogue consists of almost comically generic self-help pabulum, uttered with the pseudo sincerity of someone pretending it's something enlightening. It's not.
