Some things just suck. We can make up stories. Invoke divinity to ease the pain. Wax eloquent on “things happening for a reason” because it is almost always too horrifying to admit that the universe is random and many horror-shows have no reason, no hidden cosmic lesson. I watched Manchester by the Sea three months ago and haven’t been able to get through a single day without thinking about it. Kenneth Lonergan’s story about an insignificant janitor from Quincy who exists in a pool of melancholia that might even make Lars Von Trier unironically weep is a flawless, brave and essential act of filmmaking.
Lee’s (Casey Affleck) acutely solitary life as a janitor in Boston comes to a screeching halt when he must come home to Manchester-by-the-Sea (the eponymous town) to deal with his brother Joe’s (Kyle Chandler) death and the surprising circumstances of his being made the legal guardian of his teenage nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges). Perhaps home might not be the appropriate moniker for Manchester, as Lee has spent the better portion of his recent life abandoning it and everything else that reminds him of it. As the film alternates between the past and the present, we learn that Lee was once more than a curmudgeonly janitor; that he was an an affable family man who felt the world in its myriad, glorious shades. But mistakes were made. Blood-curdling, bone-chilling mistakes that crushed his family and shattered his marriage. Now, Lee must not only play a quasi-paternal role in Patrick’s life but also learn to live in and live with a home that he burnt (literally, as you painfully begin to learn).
At a certain level, Manchester by the Sea is about insurmountable grief. There are no happy people in Manchester-by-the-Sea, or at least not the kind who take happiness at face value. Everyone is dying, or breaking up, or leaving or in the process of copiously forgetting. Lonergan presents a grim portrait of our fallibilities and the crises that seem to be perpetually floating around the world. To understand an artist, one must examine not what really excites them but what truly frightens them. For Lonergan, I suspect, it’s life’s vicissitudes which even the excesses of cold capitalism or modern medicine cannot undo. People die. Marriages end. And sometimes the smallest of actions have unspeakable consequences. For Lonergan, the eternal Hobbesian, modernity has not precluded modern times from any of life’s essential brutishness.
But the genius of Manchester by the Sea comes not in its poetic obsessions with grief but through its desire to cultivate empathy by exposing this invariable wretchedness of the earth. If one lives long enough one starts to encounter the full-blown effects of entropy and violence and decay and destitution and cowardice and shame. Lee learns of it in his thirties, Patrick in his teens. We all do, sooner or later. But what Lonergan seems to suggest as the answer for this wretchedness is not self-pity or neo-stoicism but a frank openness; openness about the fact that much of the aforementioned morbidities can and often do co-exist with joy and laughter and growth and maybe even love.
It is telling then that there is a strange duality to every scene. The saddest scenes are almost always the funniest. Look at how Patrick begins to inconsolably weep when he looks at a frozen chicken — his deceased father’s body has been frozen because it cannot be buried until spring. Then there is the scene where Lee tells Patrick he needn’t move with him to Boston. Lee and Patrick have had an ongoing feud for the entirety of the film. Lee wants to leave Manchester and Patrick wants to stay on (he has a life with two girlfriends here and Lee’s just a janitor, he likes to say). Towards the end of the film, Lee finds a way to let Patrick remain while he can get on with his life in Boston. However, at this moment, although things have worked out, Patrick looks upset and tearfully asks Lee why he can’t stay, to which Lee soulfully responds, “Come on Patty. I can’t beat it.” The past still hangs over Lee’s head like a guillotine. And yet, there is something gleeful about the scene as Lee’s quasi-paternal role and influence in Patty’s life is sharply exposed. Perhaps the greatest and most underappreciated scene is the climactic walk that Patrick and Lee take after Joe’s funeral. Lee and Patrick play with a baseball and Lee misses a catch. As the ball rolls behind him and Patrick turns to pick it up he sighs and says, “Just let it go.” Of all the frozen chickens and dark clouds and distant seas, this metaphor is my favourite.
Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges arrive with epoch-defining performances that outdo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort and DDL’s Daniel Plainview. There is a certain self-flagellating, anger-stricken posture that Affleck manages to perfect, achieving tones of regret, loss, rage and shame often in the same shot. Hedges gets to the core of adolescent confusion — headiness of one too many dalliances coupled with incomprehensible sadness — and depicts a boy of our zeitgeist. And then there is Michelle Williams’s gut-wrenching portrayal of Randi, Lee’s ex-wife who still loves him in a familiar sort of way, the way lovers do when their relationship is over but loving isn’t. Randi and Lee are confronted with something which no human ever ought to be. They can perhaps never survive their marriage and yet, have nothing and no one to blame for its breakdown. Williams plays Randi with such grace and aplomb that I had tears in my eyes for all of the eight minutes she had on screen.
But nothing features as prominently and proudly as Lonergan’s writing, the quality of which remains unmatched in recent times. In Manchester by the Sea, there are no characters. Just ordinary men and ordinary women leading ordinary lives of quiet desperation. And like we all do but pretend we do not, they grieve for things non-existent, hate when hating hurts, hurt when hurting does not help and sometimes, if ever so rarely, give life a shot even when the air runs awfully dry. In the hands of another director, the movie could have been a bland melodrama or an ugly parable about moving on and getting over. But in the hands of Lonergan, the film is the most feel-good tragedy of our times.