Manchester by the Sea

2016's "Manchester by the Sea", written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan.

Starring Casey Affleck, Lucas Hedges, Kyle Chandler, Michelle Williams, and Gretchen Mol.

Winner of an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (Lonergan), and Best Actor (Affleck).

Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, Best Director (Lonergan), Best Supporting Actor (Hedges), and Best Supporting Actress (Williams). 

What is it about?

In Manchester, we are immediately introduced to  Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), working as a handyman for run down apartment complexes in Boston. He says little, lives a Spartan life, and at bars would rather fight strangers than reciprocate flirtation from pretty distractions. Clearly, something is off. Affleck receives word that his brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), has suffered a heart attack, and by the time Affleck has travelled to his hometown of nearby Manchester, Joe has passed. In his passing, it is discovered that Chandler willed his son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges), to Affleck for guardianship. While Lee is bonded to the headstrong and independent young man who is attached to his school, sports, and (multiple) girlfriends, Lee has no interest in raising Patrick in Manchester, and wants to move back to Boston. As the pair go about mourning and estate planning, he creeps through his old haunt of the sleepy coastal town. Some of the ghosts who turn up are his former partner, Randi (Michelle Williams), who triggers flashbacks of why Lee is so against staying in the community he once called home. Will he reconcile his trauma and step up to take care of his nephew?

Why is it worth seeing?

Great, timeless films are about characters who feel as real as anyone you know, in authentic environments we can relate to. Even when we don’t agree with their actions, we can understand them. That’s what great screenplays establish, and they hit their mark even more precisely if they can make the audience implicitly realize that, instead of explicitly telling us . The fact that Manchester by the Sea was considered a third place finisher in the Best Picture Academy Award, to eventual winner, Moonlight, and 2^nd place contender, La La Land, is an embarrassment of riches for the Best Picture category of the 2016 year (consider that if they moved back to a 5 person line up, it could have been the 3 pictures listed above, plus Hell or High Water and Arrival= Yowsa).

Affleck is mesmerizing as a broken shell of a man having to deal with a past that he seems to have wiped from the whiteboard of his memory- except it never erases completely. What he does with the little bits he has to work with is nothing short of a blessing, an epic portrait of a person's openness to a lack of availability. Him and Williams also share one of the best scenes of the year, as 2 people once connected, undeniably morphed by the hands life has dealt them, attempt to address their changes. Lucas Hedges, in his role of a teenager who spends equal time mourning the loss of his father and trying to make it with the opposite sex, rounds out the cast's conveying of that New England masculine sense of repressed emotional disconnection.


Here, writer/director Lonergan has crafted an amazingly poignant tale of grief with ridiculously good performances by the authentic cast, but what keeps it from being simplified misery porn is it features plenty of lighter moments, never taking itself too seriously, creating a delicate balance of humour and pathos. Featuring one of the better ambiguous closing shots in recent memory, Manchester delights in the discovery of this authentic world, while demonstrating (and not telling) that we all have a choice to suck it up, or pack it in.

5/5

Trailer: Click Here.