One of the best things about the recent film Manchester By The Sea is the way that its plot meanders so patiently. It is in no rush to jump to hasty conclusions or unnatural climaxes – which, unfortunately, is likely what many audience members will hate about it. But to fully appreciate what director Kenneth Lonergan is doing, to experience the portrait of grief he is painting, and to feel its depth and breadth so fully, to do so in any way other than the painstaking, reserved, and measured approach it takes would have done the film a major injustice.
Manchester By The Sea is another creation from the Damonfleck vault (Matt Damon is producer on the project), evidenced by the depiction of Massachusetts blue-collar life, and, of course, the inevitable exploitation of words that have r’s in them. Mentions of “StAH Trek” and “ShAHk attacks” abound, but more than the superficial in-jokes audience members love to hear in movies about New England, Lonergan has created a film designed to move beyond clichés and skin-deep relatability. This one you can feel down in your bones if you let it. It doesn’t follow the conventional story beats for characters going through the grieving process. It doesn’t pull happy endings out of thin air. Coping mechanisms have to be discovered and there are no guarantees that everyone will.
The story is concerned primarily with Lee, Casey Affleck’s character, his performance of which there is far too much to say than could feasibly be discussed in this review. Without giving too much away, Lee is called back to his hometown in Manchester-By-the-Sea after the death of his older brother Joe (played in flashbacks by Kyle Chandler) who had suffered a prolonged bout with congestive heart failure. Lee by extension then becomes the sole guardian of Patrick, Joe’s fifteen-year-old son. Basically, everything is a mess and no one wants any part of the situation. That much is obvious and easy to understand on paper. But the beauty of Manchester’s story is in its revelation of details. Information tumbles out slowly and always at the peak of tension, much the same way as it would in a taut crime thriller. We can only infer the baggage that Lee carries with him. We know that it’s there. We can see it in his eyes, in the way he moves, and speaks. But we’re only told when the director decides to let us in on the horrible secret.
Everyone has seen bad movies (and even good movies) that rely on communicating plots and storylines through clunky exposition and forced dialogue. Lonergan knows that his audience is not too dumb to fill in the gaps. When Lee gets a phone call from a doctor to tell him of his brother’s passing there is no cringey “What?? My brothAH’s dead?!?!?” There is no scene like that. That is not who Lee is. That is not how Lee reacts to things. It is brilliant moments of subdued acting and characterization that add so effortlessly to Manchester’s tortured but grounded aesthetic. No one creates more of these moments than Casey Affleck. He is just as incredible as every critic has claimed. It’s rare to see any character in a film communicate such immense pain with such minute gestures and minimal dialogue. If Casey Affleck is top Oscar priority as far as awards go, the screenplay is a close number two, and maybe shouldn’t even be that low.
To be clear, Manchester By the Sea is not a sadistic two-hour tearfest. Far from it. It has great moments of levity; scenarios where you can relax your shoulders and just inhabit the world that Lee and his nephew live in. Both actors play off one another as only family members do when they are young enough to laugh at the same jokes. Their relationship is more than just the cornerstone of the movie, but of each other’s lives. They need each other so clearly, but, like everything else in Manchester, this too is temporary; a Band-Aid to be torn off after the scar tissue has closed up and hardened again, never truly getting the time or care to heal. These are working-class Boston men, after all.