MANCHESTER BY THE SEA – Review

Casey Affleck Lee Chandler and Lucas Hedges as Patrick Chandler, in MANCHESTER BY THE SEA. Photo credit: Claire Folger. Copyright: K Period Media. Courtesy of Amazon Studios and Roadside Attractions.

Casey Affleck delivers a career-making performance in writer/director Kenneth Lonergan’s MANCHESTER BY THE SEA, one of the year’s best films. MANCHESTER BY THE SEA blends heartbreak and humor as Affleck’s working-class New Englander and his teenage nephew struggle to remake their lives after the death of the boy’s father. Aided by beautiful photography and outstanding acting, this brilliant film offers a natural and realistic slice of life in a small New England town, life with all its strange turns and unexpected humor, as these two move forward from their tragic loss.

Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) is called back to his hometown on the Massachusetts coast by the death of his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler), who had been the rock of their family. Although Joe’s death from congestive heart failure does not come as much of a surprise, Lee is stricken by his brother’s death nonetheless but conceals his pain under a veil of simmering anger and tough guy facade. A further shock comes when Lee learns that his brother has left him as the sole guardian of Joe’s teenage son Patrick (Lucas Hedges). Although Lee ekes out a meager living as a maintenance man for a group of modest apartments in Boston, he is surprisingly reluctant to relocate to the town where he grew up and where his family had made their livings by the sea for generations.

In the hands of a lesser director and writer, this film could have been a sentimental tearjerker but MANCHESTER BY THE SEA is actually suffused with a surprising amount of humor, as well as a low-key everyday naturalness and an authentic sense of place. The film avoids sentimentality and familiar Hollywood cliches, both about grief and about working-class families, and instead gives us a low-key style that feels more like real life, an approach that actually heightens the emotional impact of the film’s story. As Lee and Patrick cope with what needs to be done and their changed lives, events happen in the accidental, often messy way they do in real life.

One of the most surprising things about Lonergan’s film is how much humor it has given that it is a story about two people coping with a death,. But real life is like that – even while dealing with a family member’s death, life goes on, practical matters need to be handled and humor happens. In the case of Lee and his nephew Patrick, the two of them share a similar temperament and a dry, kidding tone is part of their relationship.

Matt Damon had originally been cast as Lee but having Casey Affleck, the less-famous younger brother of Ben Affleck, in the role works better for the film. Casey Affleck wrings every drop out of every scene with his low-key, moving performance. His quavering voice and contained yet vulnerable demeanor add a great deal to the performance. The interactions between his character and the boy are filled with a particular kind of male closeness, where feelings are not expressed in spoken words. Affleck’s reaction when Lee arrives at the hospital and learns his brother has just died, cutting off a final goodbye, is a moving study in redirecting grief into barely controlled anger. Lee’s traditional male expressions of grief and techniques for handling tragic events mirrors some of his nephew’s ways of dealing with his loss – indirect and particularly masculine ways.

Damon stayed on as a producer but the film is produced by Kimberly Stewart, a St. Louis native, as a debut for her production company, K Period Media. As a young black business woman, Stewart is a rarity in the film business but her company has a winner in this stellar film.

In this film, events unfold as they do in real life – that is in a messy ways and not always is logical fashion, which extends to people’s responses as well. The complete naturalness of how things unfold is one of the film’s strengths.

The relationship between the uncle and nephew have a real “guy” type relationship, which many parents of sons will recognize. Rather than expressing grief or other emotions directly, they share pizza, banter back and forth, one-up each other and quibble over unimportant things. Lee and Patrick had once been close, as shown in one of the many flashbacks that dot the film. When Patrick was small, the two had the kind of teasing, kidding, bragging interactions men traditionally have engaged in, and the two slowly find their way back to that bond, using humor to a great extent. Still, raw emotions are just beneath the surface, and grief can be sparked by small, ordinary things like something falling out of a freezer when the door is opened or a bumped head. Just like in real life.

As Lee and Patrick figure things out, periodic flashbacks give us insight on questions such as why Lee is so averse to returning to his hometown or why Patrick’s mother is not in the picture. Gretchen Mol plays Joe’s ex-wife Elise, Patrick’s mother, with a fragile tenuousness, a person who might crumble at a touch. Yet, Matthew Broderick lends an unexpected touch of humor as her overbearing second husband.

Michelle Williams plays Lee’s ex-wife Randi, and the flashbacks reveal the tragic reason why they parted ways. A scene where they meet by accident on the street after Joe’s funeral is one of the film’s most searing, acted brilliantly by both Williams and Affleck, a scene of haunting sadness and tragedy.

The Chandlers are a working class family closely tied to the sea and their community, an old-fashioned kind of men who jokes about problems and just gets the work done. An authentic sense of place is an important part of this film as well. The film is a wonderfully realistic portrait of a working-class family in a smaller seaside New England town, and equally a warm portrait of the region, filled with the distinctive accents and flinty New England humor, toughness and individuality. The portrait is warm, personal and dignified, free of the artificiality and condescension sometimes attached to depictions of working-class life.

The whole film is enhanced by shooting on location and by Jody Lee Lipes’ strikingly beautiful cinematography.

MANCHESTER BY THE SEA is a five-star film on every level, particularly Casey Affleck’s moving performance. It is a film sure to be a major force in the coming awards season.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars