Ever since seeing his directorial debut, You Can Count on Me, back in 2000, I
have been eagerly awaiting the chance to see another movie by Kenneth Lonergan. But he had such trouble with Margaret (arguments with Fox Searchlight Pictures over the final cut kept the movie out of circulation for years after
shooting ended) that it seemed to come and go before most of the public even
knew it existed. For a while, he retreated to Off-Broadway, gravely
disappointed with what had happened with his life and career.
Perhaps making a film centered on Lee Chandler, the
taciturn, tormented soul of Manchester by the Sea, was
therapeutic for Lonergan: no matter how angry, even self-pitying, the director-screenwriter
might have felt, his problems could never compare with those afflicting this
janitor/handyman.
Lee’s natural habitat is New England in mid-winter:
Warmth and light have disappeared from his life. He capably performs his work—shoveling
snow, cleaning out toilets, and other assorted jobs. But he never smiles, never
becomes emotionally involved with anyone—and frequently annoys tenants and gets
into drunken brawls in bars.
In the mid-19th century, Herman
Melville’s Moby-Dick described
similar spiritual desolation: “Whenever I find myself growing grim about the
mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find
myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear
of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper
hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from
deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats
off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.”
As I watched Lonergan’s quiet but profoundly moving
drama, I couldn’t help associating Lee with Melville’s narrator Ishmael: the
tight mouth, the “damp, drizzly” environment, funerals, even punching people
one hardly knows. Lee, however, doesn’t have Ishmael’s option. The sea, where
he and his brother Joe cemented tight bonds of freedom and fellowship, is now
closed off, like everything else in his life, in a fog of grief and
self-laceration.
Flashbacks show both Lee’s happier times and the
catastrophe that ended his children’s lives, his marriage and, seemingly, any
hope that he might emerge from his self-imposed life sentence.
But in the present,
Lee is, despite himself, jolted out of his numbed isolation: Joe has not only
died of a heart attack, but named his brother as guardian of his teenage son
Patrick—and even financially facilitated Lee’s move back to Manchester, the
town that knows all too well the source of his anguish.
The role of Lee was supposed to go to Matt Damon,
but prior commitments led him to withdraw and accept a producer credit.
Instead, the part went to Casey Affleck.
A decade ago, Affleck (pictured) performed unexpectedly well in
his brother Ben’s adaptation of the Dennis Lehane detective novel Gone, Baby, Gone, and even was nominated
for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The
Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. But offscreen, his
participation in a hoax by Joaquin Phoenix and involvement in sexual harassment
lawsuits filed by two women (since settled) sidelined him from consideration
for roles that might otherwise have come his way.
Now, his performance as Lee thrusts Affleck back into the Hollywood casting conversation. His slow gait and dead eyes reveal more than words can the emotional numbness of his character. To its credit, Lonergan’s script does not provide Lee with an easy way to grace, and Affleck provides this haunted man with a physical tightness that makes his strangled despair easy to understand.
One expects Lonergan, given his background as a
playwright and screenwriter, to excel at dialogue, but he also shows an
instinct here for emblematic silent moments (e.g., the agony of watching an EMT
unit hoist a gurney carrying a loved one into the ambulance)
He also provides multiple members of the supporting
cast with moments to shine: not only Michelle Williams as Lee’s ex-wife Randy (in a scene, almost sure to earn her an
Oscar nomination, when she vents her anguish in order to get Lee to release
his); but also Friday Night Lights’ Kyle Chandler as Joe; Gretchen Mol as Joe’s brittle ex-wife,
an alcoholic he doesn’t dare trust to raise his son; Matthew Broderick (a frequent star in Lonergan plays and films) as her new pious boyfriend; and even Lonergan, in a
cameo as a pedestrian who, with one remark, goads Lee into one of his rages.
Manchester
by the Sea runs counter to the action-packed drama that
Hollywood loves. Slow-moving, naturalistic, it thrives on an intense focus on
character and refuses to pander to audiences’ wishes for a snap ending that
ties everything up in a nice big bow. It simply has the ring of truth about the
way that ordinary people live their lives. Let’s hope that during awards
season, it is properly recognized.
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