MANCHESTER BY THE SEA

          Several years ago an entertainment reporter from a newspaper (in Texas I think), called me up to ask about recent trends in film.  I inferred that he wanted me to say something about explosions, rocket blasts, car chases, superheroes, computer generated images, and all the other gimmickry that so many people mistake for movie making.  Instead,  I  told him that American pictures now and then showed signs of waking up to the heritage of literary works like Winesburg, Ohio, examining something of  the dreariness, loneliness, and emptiness of small towns and small lives, the drab underside of American life that seldom appears in the glossiness of Hollywood cinema.  (Of course, that conclusion ignores all those flicks about young people straying into some little Southern town inhabited by inbred cannibals eager for new, preferably college educated nourishment).  Surprisingly, he seemed uninterested after that.

          Perhaps beginning back with The Last Picture Show, the industry occasionally turns away from the sentimental vision of works like It’s a Wonderful Life, one of my personal nonfavorites, and explores something darker and sadder in movies like All the Real Girls, The Good Girl, Beautiful Girls, Monster’s Ball, Sling Blade, even About Schmidt, which if it strays from the small town, retains some of the great American vision of disillusion and disappointment out there in flyover country.  In the midst of the holiday season, when the multiplexes explode in fireworks and sophisticated technology positively leaps from the screen, a rather modest, low-key film inspired garlands of superlatives and generous sprinklings of exclamation points, and has already won some of those bogus prizes that the industry employs to praise itself.  The movie, Manchester by the Sea, tells a very simple story that reflects an understanding of the sad poetry of ordinary life, the impossible situations we often occupy, the problems we struggle and often fail to solve. 

It uses a series of flashbacks to explain something of its present, but mostly stays within the narrow boundaries of its main character’s life.  Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), who works as the superintendent for a handful of apartment buildings in Quincy, Massachusetts, must handle the difficulties created by the sudden death of his older brother Joe back in his hometown of Manchester by the Sea.  And that’s about it, that’s the whole subject of the film.  Throughout the movie Lee attempts to figure out the next steps in his life and form some sort of relationship with his brother’s sixteen-year-old son Patrick (Lucas Hedges).  In the process those flashbacks reveal the tragedy that in effect chased Lee out of his home town and created the sad emptiness of his present life.  A drunk and a brawler who steadfastly resists even the slightest human connection, whether from a woman in a bar, the mother of his nephew’s girlfriend, or even his ex-wife eager for some communication, Lee excludes anyone who attempts to penetrate the carapace that surrounds his pain and protects him from the world. 

The performances rhyme with the subjects and rhythms of the film, so that the mostly working class people seem completely real, not acting so much as living their mostly drab, awkward, ordinary lives.  Casey Affleck plays Lee Chandler in a remarkable series of understated conversations and odd silences, only occasionally allowing the combustion inside his spirit to flame out in anger and violence.  The whole cast matches him perfectly, especially Lucas Hedges as his nephew Patrick and Michelle Williams as his ex-wife, who shares his tragedies and heartbreak but cannot enter the prison he has constructed for himself.

Written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, who clearly knows the place and its people, the movie works on every level, so that its frequent establishing shots of the actual town of Manchester by the Sea signal a brief, seamless glimpse of the past or provide a bridge between scenes and sequences.  Perhaps too literal and deliberate at times, it nevertheless creates a world where everyone apparently suffers some terrible loss, some failure of love, some bleak prospect of an unsatisfactory life ahead.  The script offers no solutions and refuses to settle for any easy answers to its problems, some neat closure of its action, which explains how really unusual a film Lonergan has made, a slice of life more authentic than just about every other motion picture now playing.