Movie Review: Manchester by the Sea

Emotionally gruelling—yet somehow still funny—Manchester by the Sea magnificently covers the wide expanse of human experience.

It’s probably the opposite of a tantalising recommendation to say Kenneth Lonergan’s movies depict tragedy, trauma and grief with greater vomit-inducing accuracy than anything else in cinema today.

And it’s probably downright baffling to add he’s one of our best humourists, in addition to humanists.

Manchester by the Sea, his third effort since debuting with You Can Count On Me sixteen years ago, runs the gamut. “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll hurl,” isn’t just the tagline for Wayne’s World anymore.

Casey Affleck plays Lee Chandler, a damaged loner who works as a handyman in Boston and spends his spare hours drinking in his hovel of an apartment, avoiding eye contact and picking fights when he feels his expectation of personal privacy—to be ignored, as if he was a ghost—is compromised.

He is barely shaken from his stupor by tragic news from home: his older brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), has succumbed to the heart disease that always threatened to cut his life short, and which drove his ex-wife (Gretchen Mol) to drink. So, Lee heads to Manchester-by-the-Sea, a small coastal town in Massachusetts, to make arrangements for the body, and to potentially relocate Joe’s 16-year-old son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges), who’s balancing two girlfriends, a band and hockey practice.

Patrick wonders why Lee can’t just give up his janitorial job and move back to Manchester. But the constant reminders of Lee’s old life—dredged up by the mere presence of ex-wife Randi (Michelle Williams)—make a permanent stay in Manchester impossible. Through flashbacks, we discover what precisely Lee is running from. When you learn, you’re astounded he can bear to be back even briefly.

The naturalistic performances and Lonergan’s understated hand as a filmmaker and screenwriter fool you into thinking these characters are real people attempting to navigate real lives. (Perhaps that’s for the best, because if Casey Affleck didn’t disappear into the role of Lee entirely, our thoughts on him at the personal level might have compromised the film. Affleck, like Lee, is evading a troubling past, and Manchester by the Sea is about one’s capacity for forgiveness, of oneself and others. You will need to draw your own line when it comes to clemency.)

That isn’t to say Lonergan is hands-off. In one instance, he’s so hands-on, he appears on screen to lay them on Affleck. Cameoing as a passer-by who briefly gets into a stoush with Lee, Jody Lee Lipes’ camera follows Lonergan as he walks away, chastised by the encounter. We never see him again; however, he gets one extra second of the feature’s 137 minutes all to himself. A moment of personal vanity? Not so.

In Lonergan’s movies, everyone must keep living their lives, and be reminded of the smallness of their own story. In his troubled, brilliant Margaret, Lonergan demonstrated this with his sound mix, drowning out public conversations of the lead characters with arbitrary waffle from their fellow New Yorkers.

Lonergan takes a subtler approach on this, with layered audio, intricate staging and idiosyncratic choices: TVs blare and customers chat on the phone while Lee carries on with his handiwork; hockey players mutter among themselves and scrape the ice while Patrick learns of his dad’s passing in the distance; Lee clutches a bag of groceries while facing life-changing misfortune; strangers get into fights, then continue on their way. Life goes on, painfully.

But also, funnily. As I’ve warned in the past, “beware the picture with no sense of humour… they don’t take place in a universe where feelings other than extreme pain can conceivably exist.” Even amid the gruelling agony of Manchester by the Sea, there are unexpected moments of warmth and genuine hilarity. In the flick’s most punishing sequence, paramedics struggle mightily to collapse the legs of a gurney while lifting it into an ambulance, as if they were the Three Stooges. I choked out an honest-to-goodness laugh, tears still caught in my eyes.

It reminded me of a similar collision of slapstick humour and heartbreak in South Korea’s The Host. It also brought the Japanese classic Ikiru to mind. Most American pictures are uncomfortable marrying these extremes, unless in the guise of quirky affectation (as in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl). Lonergan, a Pulitzer-nominated playwright, knows there’s no such sensation as loss if you live in a world where there’s nothing valuable to lose. And the suggestion that goodness remains, after the worst events imaginable, is a beacon of hope, absent from most cloying, conventional tearjerkers.

Affleck’s isn’t the only performance that leaves a deep impression. Williams, in her limited screen-time, and Hedges, in a break-out role that evokes young Matt Damon (a producer here), similarly press down on audiences’ chest-plates, again with good humour and underlying suffering. The ensemble is fitted with friendly faces and unknows, further blurring the line between real and fake. (Do the people of Manchester all have SAG cards or something?)

Everyone moves in one direction, under the stewardship of Lonergan, who it seemed for a moment would never make anything else after Margaret (which toiled in limbo for years, the result of lawsuits between Lonergan and its producers). If he had ended there, he would have nonetheless been responsible for one of the all-time greats. With Manchester by the Sea, he proves he’s somehow still getting better.

5/5

In cinemas February 2. Rating MA15+ for strong coarse language.

Photo: Universal