Manchester by the Sea

Directed By: Kenneth LonerganWritten By: Kenneth LonerganStarring: Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Lucas

Hedges, Kyle Chandler, Gretchen Mol

Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester By the Sea straddles an impossibly narrow tightrope. It is a film that is strikingly subdued, a film defined by meticulous nuance and deep-rooted naturalism. Yet it is also a film that is fiercely cinematic, a narrative that is shaped by epic drama and emotional confrontations so charged and bruising that in less sensitive hands they would have tipped hopelessly into exploitation long before the viewer could ever have truly registered their magnitude. The magic of Manchester can be seen in Lonergan’s, and his performers’, ability to reconcile this binary, to blend the natural and the cinematic into a story of pointed verisimilitude steeped in pathos.

The beacon of this aforementioned nuance is Casey Affleck as Lee Chandler, a painfully withdrawn Boston janitor who lives alone in a single person apartment. Much like the Chiron character in the similarly tragic Moonlight, it is precisely in Lee’s lack of articulation that he articulates most. He is harbouring something horrible, this we know through his nonsensical barroom punch-ups and faltering manners. But just how deeply engrained this pain is can be spotted in Affleck’s championing of small gestures; the way Affleck’s eyes pivot to-and-fro in quiet moments as though he’s visualising a ping pong game; the way he drearily places his hands on his hips; the way his head seems to be forever weighed down; that faint red bordering around his eyes, trapping them in a state of appearing as though fresh tears have just been wiped away. It is a performance of a tapestry’s fine-grained texture.

When we first meet Lee he is living the last happy passage of his life, fishing on his brother’s boat (his brother, Joe, is played by Kyle Chandler), and playfully teasing his nephew Patrick. This passage is not current however. In the present day, Lee cycles through his monotonous janitorial duties on autopilot; checking plumbing, shovelling snow. His brother’s sudden, but not unexpected, death means Lee must relocate from Boston to his former home and titular town Manchester, where he is unhappily straddled with guardianship of Patrick (now 16 and played by Lucas Hedges). What’s evident in the transition is that Manchester is the arena of Lee’s troubles, his return there dictating he must now confront that something horrible he harbours. Less certain is exactly what this something is, as Lonergan proceeds to delicately, gradually, shade in Lee’s past via a kaleidoscopic lo

ok through time.

The film’s mashing of linearity is frequent and un-forecasted. It offers a unique before-and-after shot whilst keeping the imperative centre moment in the dark. We see Lee in his relatively happy marriage to Randi (Michelle Williams). They quarrel over Lee’s drinking, but there is no malice there. So why are they now estranged? What drives their pain? (Lee and Randi’s eventual confrontation towards the film’s end is so crushing it threatens to cut off one’s air supply.) We see Lee’s glimmers of passed happiness countered with notions of total pity; “no one can appreciate what you’ve been through” Lee is told during a conversation which Lonergan splices with images of Lee’s once civil domestic life. What could possibly demarcate these two halves of the same story?  Lonergan’s allowing these questions to linger causes them burrow in the mind, augmenting Lee’s sense of loss by attacking it from two angles.

The screenplay, written by its director, is among the strongest of all awards contenders, due not only to its ability to communicate in between the lines of dialogue, but also in how quietly daring it is. Lonergan’s habit of locating comedy in the most improbable of situations is audacious; what is arguably the film’s most gut-tearing moment is ruptured by a piece of physical comedy involving a gurney, a sequence that has no earthly business onscreen, yet there it is, and it works. It’s like finding a garden floating in the middle of the ocean. Lonergan’s frequent juxtapositions of humour and trauma boomerangs the viewer across the vastest of emotional terrains.

It is within this comic vein that Lucas Hedges’ performance flourishes. Lee and Patrick’s clashing often rings with the amusing air of bickerings between a long-suffering husband and wife, Patrick’s bratty selfishness often the catalyst. In one exchange, Lee orders his nephew to move to Boston with him,

a notion which Patrick rebuffs on the grounds that he has two girlfriends that need him in Manchester. What a brilliantly flimsy platform for sympathy. And yet Hedges too provides moments of anguish which slide under the skin, the dynamic of the two performers mercurial in its shifting from comedic to affectionate.

Most daring however is Lonergan’s willingness to pose questions without answers, to offer conflict without resolution. There are no bows to tie this story together, no payoffs to lift the weight from the viewer, none of that catharsis we so often crave in our movies. Lonergan’s characters not only scar when they are cut, but they continue to bleed long after they are wounded. This could easily be a frustration, but in a story so enveloped in isolation, so soaked in self-hatred and muted pain, Lonergan’s rejection of respite is all the more honest and evocative. For Lee, relief is like the sea itself which he cruises upon on his brother’s boat; as beautiful and exceedingly tranquil as it is un-acquirable. It’s not something which can be possessed, only flirted with and gazed upon. There is a moment in which Lee does just this, gazing from his home out to the sea, before putting his fist through the window which separates him from the water in a fit of rage. He cuts himself badly. To even reach for the sea, for the peace that it denotes, becomes a pained, traumatic exercise.

Rating:

4/4