Manchester by the Sea (2016)

Manchester by the Sea (2016)

Movie Rating  8.5/10

Director: Kenneth Lonergan

Writer: Kenneth Lonergan

Stars: Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler

R | 2h 17min | Drama

Story line

An Uncle is obliged to return home to care for his nephew after his brother dies. Unknowing he is to be the guardian and struggles with the decision. Throughout the movie he recounts past memories that caused him to leave Manchester and distancing himself from his past.

‘Manchester by the Sea’ and the Tides of Grief

In each of the three movies Kenneth Lonergan has directed, characters move through their everyday lives under the shadow of death. The brother and sister played by Mark Ruffalo and Laura Linney in “You Can Count on Me” (2000) had, when they were children, lost their parents in a car crash, a trauma that rippled unspoken beneath their mundane adult interactions. The coming-of-age of Lisa Cohen, the New York teenager (Anna Paquin) at the center of “Margaret” (2011), was complicated by a fatal bus accident and colored by the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Early in Mr. Lonergan’s new film, “Manchester by the Sea,” Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) is summoned back to his hometown by news that his older brother, Joe, has died. Joe, an affable bear of a man (Kyle Chandler, in flashbacks), had had congestive heart failure for a long time, so his death, while wrenching and sad, could not have been entirely unexpected. What Joe’s 16-year-old son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges), and Lee face together might fall under the heading of ordinary grief: tragic to be sure, but manageable.

Lee, though, already lives with a much more extreme kind of pain. You can see it in his smallest gestures and hear it in his flat, careful diction. The force of his pent-up emotion is terrifying, and so is the self-control he must exercise to keep it invisible. Mr. Affleck, in one of the most fiercely disciplined screen performances in recent memory, conveys both Lee’s inner avalanche of feeling and the numb decorum that holds it back.

The source of his anguish is revealed about halfway through the film, which almost buckles, like Lee himself, under the weight of unimaginable horror.

How could anyone deal with such a disaster? How do you live with yourself afterward? Mr. Lonergan poses these questions not in the abstract, but as practical matters. Much of the action in “Manchester by the Sea” consists of dumb routines and petty disruptions, the kind of stuff that keeps happening even in the wake of enormous changes and dramatic upheavals. Before he learns of Joe’s death, Lee, who works as a janitor in a handful of apartment buildings near Boston, shovels snow, takes out the garbage and tackles plumbing problems.

A lot happens, and a surprising amount of it is very funny. Mr. Lonergan, a brilliant playwright and a sought-after script doctor, is a master of the quotidian absurd. In his work, the laws of the universe are rigged to make human beings look ridiculous, and the species is internally wired to produce the same effect, so no amount of good taste or moral discipline can stop the jokes from coming. In Lee’s earlier life, when he lived with his wife, Randi (Michelle Williams), and their three children, he was a joker, the mischievous, wisecracking life of his own roving party. Even in his stunned, spiritually crippled later condition, the habits of sarcasm and chop-busting stick with him like phantom-limb sensations. Joy may be out of reach, but he can’t help but find shards of humor wherever he looks.

This trait clearly runs in the family. Lee and his nephew, thrown together by bereavement, have the makings of a comedy team.

“What happened to your hand?” Patrick asks Lee, noticing bandages and blood.

“I cut it.”

“Oh, thanks. For a minute there I didn’t know what happened.”

They’ve got a million of them. But Mr. Lonergan isn’t trafficking in bittersweet sitcom beats. He’s after a kind of realism rarely found in recent American movies, which often seem to think that audiences will be confused or offended when the silly and the serious collide onscreen.

“Manchester by the Sea” is a finely shaded portrait, a study in individual misery set in a place that is observed with care and affection. Mr. Affleck and Mr. Hedges are exceptional, but the rest of the large cast is nearly as fine. (I’d single out Ms. Williams, Ms. Mol and C. J. Wilson, who plays Joe’s best pal and business partner.) The coastal Massachusetts town that gives the movie its name is picturesque in a modest, thrifty New England way. Not breathtaking, but calm and orderly, its hills flecked with tall deciduous trees and clapboard houses, its harbor ringed with low-slung, rocky islands.

In the opening scene — a memory of Lee, Patrick and Joe out on the boat under a bright blue sky, teasing and roughhousing and trying to catch a fish — it’s heaven. Later it feels like purgatory, a wintry place with flat skies, leaden waters and unwelcome reminders of the past. (The cinematographer who deftly captures this rough beauty is Jody Lee Lipes.)

But “Manchester by the Sea” is not only about Lee and his family, and not only about their houses and boats and drinking habits and marriages. It is also about what all those things mean, and what kinds of sentimental and ideological value are attached to them. The movie takes up, indirectly and perhaps inadvertently but powerfully and unmistakably, a subject that has lately reinserted itself dramatically into American political discourse. It’s a movie, that is, about the sorrows of white men.

I’m not being dismissive. I’m being specific. Mr. Lonergan is too astute about the textures of American life to assume that the racial and class identities of his characters are incidental or without larger significance. That was true of the rich New York kids in Mr. Lonergan’s play “This Is Our Youth,” from 1996, and it’s no less true of the grown-up citizens of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts here, even if they are too diffident or too busy for sociological self-consciousness.

In 21st-century American cinema — from “Mystic River” to “Gone Baby Gone,” from “The Fighter” to “The Departed” — the Bay State is where the myths of post-ethnic -class white identity have been forged. Nonwhite characters are as scarce as fully articulated r’s, and the uncomfortable racial history that has existed in reality (the Boston busing battles of the 1970s, for instance) is easily ignored. There is no legacy of slavery or Jim Crow, and therefore an aura of innocence can be maintained amid the dysfunction and sentimentality and clannishness.

Manchester by the Sea,” partly because it is a product of the Damon-Affleck industrial complex, partakes of some of this myth-mongering, but it also resists the more tiresome clichés of the blue-collar Boston movie. (There are moments when the exploitation of the local accent verges on parody. Why else write an extended argument over the merits of “St-AH Trek” or a series of jokes about sh-AH-ks?) Mr. Lonergan is more interested in guilt than in criminality, and less concerned with nostalgia than with the psychology of loss.

This is not a pseudo-epic of redemption or revenge, with boxers and gangsters and their churchgoing moms and wives. It’s a masculine melodrama that doubles as a fable of social catastrophe. Lee, Joe and their friends would never define themselves as privileged. They have proletarian tastes and sensibilities. But they also have paid-up houses and boats, kids on track for college, decent medical care and an ironclad entitlement to the benefit of the doubt. (Observe what happens to Lee in the Manchester police station and you’ll see what I mean.) Their main problems come from women, who spoil the parties, don’t get the jokes and sometimes can’t control their drinking or keep their pants on. Some are good moms or good sports, and anyway, a man can always steal away to the boat or the basement with the guys and some beers.

Cast out of this working man’s paradise, Lee is also exiled from the prerogatives of whiteness. He lives in a basement room, earning minimum wage, answering to an African-American boss and accepting a tip from a black tenant whose toilet he has cleaned and repaired. He doesn’t complain, but it is also clear that he has chosen these conditions as a form of self-abasement, as punishment for his sins.

Maybe its sounds like I’m over-reading, or making an accusation. But to deny that “Manchester by the Sea” has a racial dimension is to underestimate its honesty and overlook its difficult relevance. Lee is guilty and angry, half-convinced that what happened was not his fault and half-certain that it was, unable to apologize or to accept apologies, paralyzed by grief and stung by a sense of grievance. He’s broken, and he’s also smart enough to realize — and Mr. Lonergan is wise and generous enough to allow him to understand — that nothing will make him whole again.

 Read full review at New york times

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Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams will Break your Heart

The writer-director Kenneth Lonergan listens to his characters with the gentle forbearance of a Catholic priest receiving confession from his more error-prone parishioners—unshocked by what he hears, even quietly amused, generous with the absolutions. In Lonergan’s third film, Manchester by the Sea, Casey Affleck plays Lee Chandler, a taciturn janitor who lives alone in a basement in Boston and spends his days scrubbing toilets, shoveling snow, doing odd handyman jobs. Hands jammed into his pockets, Lee seems a million miles away, eyes hazing over in conversations, small talk or flirtation striking him like a fly on a windscreen. You can practically feel the dead air around him. When he drinks, alone in a bar, he drinks to oblivion, and when someone looks at him the wrong way, he picks a fight almost like a kid rolling his eyes at his teacher, accepting the battering as his daily due—the tax on his existence.

What is with this guy? What happened to Lee? We don’t find out until about an hour into the film, after Lee is summoned back to his hometown of Manchester, a small fishing community on Boston’s north shore, by the news that his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) has died. Moreover, Lee has been given custody of Joe’s brittle, pithy-tongued teenage son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges). Patrick’s mother is an alcoholic—out of the picture. Meanwhile, there are funeral arrangements to be made, pizzas to be microwaved and two girlfriends to be shuffled. “Am I supposed to tell you to use a condom?” Lee asks Patrick; he’s a wholly reluctant step-parent.

In some ways, Manchester by the Sea is a development of Lonergan’s 2000 debut, You Can Count on Me , one of the most moving films of the noughties, about a brother and sister who lose their parents as kids and come together again as adults to raise the sister’s young son. Makeshift parents, reluctantly recruited from within the same family, clearly intrigue Lonergan: He followed with Margaret (2011), the story of a young girl, her existence poisoned by a fatal bus accident, who must find her own way in a post-9/11 New York. Held up for years in the editing process and the subject of litigation between Lonergan and the film’s producers, Margaret was, upon its release, deemed a wounded masterpiece by critics sensing a replay of the old Orson Welles story: Auteur mangled by the studio system. The film had all the spectral beauty and pathos peculiar to shipwrecks, but it was a wreck nonetheless.

In Manchester by the Sea, the ship sails beautifully from beginning to end. Flashbacks invite us to happier times for Lee, his wife, Randi (Michelle Williams), and their three kids before, finally, the plot’s turning point is revealed: a lightning strike of Sophoclean intensity, playing out to the sound of Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor, that resists easy description. As does the film. It isn’t a weepie, although its classical score tugs it close to such tastefully lachrymose classics as Robert Redford’s Ordinary People. Nor is it one of those bittersweet indies that cunningly entwine tragedy with comedy of family dysfunction, though it is full of bickering families who drink too much.

Much of the movie simply follows as Lee keeps company with Patrick—driving him to school, band practice or one of his girlfriends’ houses. A scene in a hospital turns into a family fight. Grief plays out over frozen chicken. “I can’t believe we’re having this conversation now,” says a girlfriend of Patrick’s, as news of his father’s death segues into a discussion of the merits of Star Trek . Lonergan has done his writing a huge favor by forcing his story’s heartbreak to peep from behind these tough, flinty New England exteriors, where it must jostle with sarcasm and world-class needling. For all its tragedy, the film sings with sharp, clear truths about human motivation and behavior. The humor deepens the heartache, and the heartache sharpens the humor

Lonergan found the right man in Affleck, standing stony-faced while others weep, his performance a master class in submerged feeling. Every gesture carries the faint rumblings of an internal avalanche. But it’s Williams who stuns, in the course of a single, astonishing dialogue toward the end of the film, after she and Lee run into each other at a supermarket. If this actress were put on earth to do one thing only, it would be this scene. “I’ve got nothing big to say,” she says, tearing up behind agonized small talk. And then heaven’s vault cracks.

 Read full review at Newsweek

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 Movie Rating ★★★★★

Perhaps the most emotionally intelligent film you will see this year stars Casey Affleck as a blue-collar worker who is suddenly landed with caring for his teenage nephew when his brother dies. This entails a return to his home town, the Manchester-by-the-Sea of the title, and there repressed memories erupt in a hot lava of anger.

Affleck’s complex, taciturn performance becomes a constant heartache for the audience, as the mystery of his past is slowly revealed. The film begins with the wide blue horizon on a boat motoring away from the charming clapboard buildings of the old fishing town, but then the action crushes itself into the bowels of a Boston apartment block where Affleck’s character, Lee Chandler, is a put-upon handyman.

“The Lee Chandler?” people ask when his name is mentioned in Manchester, and there is a wariness or fear in their reactions. Yet we see flashbacks of Lee with his wife Randy, played by Michelle Williams in bedsocks and a bathrobe, with a nose sweetly red from the cold. Lee appears to be a handsome, beer-drinking, sea-fishing Boston Irish Catholic and his withdrawal from the world seems inexplicable.

Manchester by the Sea is written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, whose critically acclaimed 2011 film Margaret was described as a “thwarted masterpiece” after studio battles, but his new production is fully realised. He manages to paint ordinary life in honest, funny, almost pointilliste detail, while revealing the Greek tragedy underneath. Indeed, midway through, this film has one of the most harrowing scenes a parent will ever witness, so come equipped with tissues.

The wake and funeral for Lee’s brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) requires almost no words, just a soaring church organ, and Lonergan’s use of music, from opera to the car radio, adds much to the emotional power. As an accomplished playwright, Lonergan’s dialogue — muddled, hesitant, sometimes just missing — is utterly believable.

Lee, who in many ways seems barely an adult himself, discovers he is the guardian of his brother’s 16-year-old son Patrick (a box-fresh Lucas Hedges), and his parenting is awkward, cackhanded and argumentative, his cooking limited to reheating yesterday’s pizza in the microwave. Meanwhile Patrick, with the irrepressible optimism of youth, tries to get on with life – and get it on, wherever possible: “I’ve got two girlfriends, I’m in a band, and I’m on the hockey team,” he boasts. The band practice is hilariously awful: “We are Stentorian!” he announces, as they thrash away in the basement.

Lonergan is daring enough to eschew the obvious routes in this plot, the cloying cliché of closure, while examining grief and emotional damage with the tenderest of microscopes. And this is Affleck’s movie. Never has speechlessness been so articulate. 

 Read full review at The times

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Casey Affleck Is the Anchor and Soul of Manchester by the Sea   

In Kenneth Lonergan's new film, the way people talk is captured in a way that's so detailed it’s almost Dickensian   

The place you’re from is the most terrible and beautiful place in the world. It may be so terrible and beautiful that you stay forever, or so terrible and beautiful that you just feel stuck. But maybe the only way to take the true measure of a place’s terror and beauty is to leave it like a bat out of hell, only to be drawn back. That’s what happens to Lee Chandler, the character played by Casey Affleck in Kenneth Lonergan’s enveloping, deeply affecting drama Manchester by the Sea.

When we first meet Lee, he’s working as a super in a nondescript building that you just know, if you’ve ever lived there, is somewhere in working-class Boston. That Boston is both just a short drive and a world away from where Lee comes from, a town on the North Shore where many still make their living off the sea, as fishermen. While Lee is dealing with leaky plumbing, and with tenants who belittle or condescend to him, he gets a call that alarms him. He makes arrangements to leave his job temporarily and starts driving north.

Lee’s older brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), for whom he’d do just about anything, has died, entrusting Lee with the care of his teenage son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges). Lee adores his nephew, but he isn’t up to the task of fatherhood, for reasons that emerge as the petals of this multilayered story fall away. Years earlier, something terrible happened to Lee, and it’s deadened him at the center. His embittered ex-wife, Randi (Michelle Williams), has little patience with him. And as he struggles to settle his brother’s affairs—which include figuring out what to do with the family boat, an old chugger in need of expensive repairs—he worries more and more about what role he should play in Patrick’s life. His anxieties intensify when Joe’s long-estranged, unstable ex-wife and Patrick’s mother, Elise (Gretchen Mol), tries to return, staking a claim to her son.

That’s the “what happens” of Manchester by the Sea, but the sturdy, supple magic of the film lies in the “how”—the way Kenneth Lonergan and his actors capture the way people talk, and what they care about, in a way so detailed it’s almost Dickensian. Lonergan was known as a playwright before he began directing films—his first, in 2000, was You Can Count on Me, followed by the 2011 Margaret—and he has a knack for making pictures that feel theatrical without being stagy. More sidelong than declarative, they take their time unwinding, leading you through a story rather than telling it outright. The effect can be maddening or wonderful, depending on your taste and on your mood that day, but if you open yourself to the experience, Lonergan’s movies allow you to live with characters until they feel like people you know. Sometimes they’re people you don’t like very much. But somehow, by the end, they’re your people.

These are the kinds of roles actors vault over one another to play, and everyone in Manchester by the Sea rises to the job. Chandler, an actor with the face and the charm of the young (and even the old) Robert Forster, is terrifically casual in the flashback scenes: We immediately get the nature of his relationship with Lee—they cuff each other like lion cubs, but they’re ready to defend one another with both their claws and their truest stripes. Hedges, as Patrick, hits the sweet spot between teenage defensiveness and pure, guileless openness: He’s on the hockey team, he’s in a band, he has two girlfriends—but even as he’s grabbing for everything in life, grief pulls him back, hard. Hedges shows what happens when a confident kid gets hit with that kind of curveball.

Michelle Williams is glorious, as a woman whose anger and grief have become as entwined as a thick, hard root: The scene where the ground cracks around her, and her anguish breaks free, is something to behold. But Casey Affleck is both the soul and the anchor of the movie. Lee is benumbed and anguished—at times he looks so dazed and indecisive you wonder how he can even move. And then, when he’s had a little too much to drink in a bar and thinks a bunch of upper-crusty white guys are laughing at him (maybe they actually are), he springs to action like a threatened animal, every anxiety or regret uncoiling inside him in one bright burst. As an actor, Affleck has often seemed to me playing only slight variations on the same character: He has always seemed a little nervous and drifty, and there’s a watery quality to his voice that I’ve never been able to warm to. But I would trade every Meryl Streep performance that’s rightly or wrongly lauded by millions of people for just one performance that changes my mind about an actor, and Affleck in Manchester by the Sea is one of those. When Lee tries to brace Patrick for the sight of his dead father’s body, he says, “He looks like he’s dead. He doesn’t look like he’s sleeping or anything.” And then he adds, “He doesn’t look gross, either.” Just how do you explain what a person you love looks like when all life has left him? Affleck describes it as if he were steering a boat in waters as still as glass, but inside, he’s facing the wind. Even if you can’t hear the howling, you can see it in his eyes.

Read full review at Time

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