Manchester by the Sea

Film (2016)

With Casey Affleck (Lee Chandler), Michelle Williams (Randi Chandler), Lucas Hedges (Patrick), Anna Baryshnikov (Sandy), C. J. Wilson (George), Kyle Chandler (Joe Chandler), Matthew Broderick (Jeffrey)

Lee (Casey Affleck) broods. He drinks. He brawls. He’s also a dutiful janitor at a housing complex and a character with a sincere, though deeply troubled, disposition. His older brother, Joe (Joe Chandler) well before his time, is fraught with a heart condition and Lee is forced into the guardianship of his nephew, Patrick (Lucase Hedges). Navigating the space after this occurs, Lee and Patrick engage and tousle with one another as they work towards a resolution. Meanwhile, Randi (Michelle Williams), Lee’s ex-wife, shows up to add drama. Lots of flashbacks give us hints of what has created Lee’s overwrought condition and lots of snatches of classical music remind us this is an art film about drunk and troubled people.

It’s almost a brand at this point: Irish working-class people stuck in some neighborhood in or around Boston, intense, troubled, full of drink and violence, and brooding with long, intent gazes that enable the camera to pause, dwell, and take up residence upon their faces. One of these comes out every few years and a big deal is made about them because they capture that intensity – or try to – in a way that has enormous appeal for some part of the film-going public.

Here, though the subject-matter is working-class and the main character is specifically named to indicate that he’s not the typical Irish subject of such Boston-situated tales, this film is arty, and never fails to remind the audience of that. The long, long, long scenes in which Lee travels from one part of his life to another are meant to be penetrating, but they soon become tedious in their profusion. The script is not economical. A lot of additional written baggage finds its way in. Perhaps the author thinks of this as realism, but it comes across mostly as literary indulgence. What does this passage tell me about this scene or this character? Frequently, not much, but it’s there and it fills the space.

The highly allusive structure of the narrative generates some degree of suspense, but there is so little exploration of the central character or of what troubles him that the allusions to the tragic past do little more that whet the appetite. The film is suggestive at every turn and seems to want to make its hay on that account, but it is so intentionally sketchy in its outlines that it again seems like more of an arty exercise in skeletal depiction than actual economy. Oddly, the economy or bareness of the narrative is so completely at odds with the utter lack of economy in the dialogue itself that the contrast is weirdly striking.

Casey Affleck creates an intense character, indeed. But, after awhile, the moodiness, the silence, the explosiveness, don’t tell enough and neither his portrayal nor the character Lonergan has written exhibit enough of history behind the brooding anguish to make Lee seem much more than a troubled lout. The prototype of this sort of character is Brando’s Terry Molloy in On The Waterfront (1954), a grippingly violent, passionate, moody and troubled character, but one whose sources of confusion and travail become painfully obvious. That is far less the case in Manchester by the Sea.

The performance by Lucas Hedges as Patrick, Lee’s nephew, is charming, though one is a bit pressed to understand the kid’s level of adjustment in the wake of what he’s had to deal with. It’s an odd formulation and is strikingly unrealistic, seemingly done so to create a halo of badness around Lee.

Michelle Williams (Randi) shows up a bit and does okay as Lee’s ex, but she’s not given enough time to do much. Matthew Broderick (Jeffrey) has even less time as a new parent figure on the scene. Building up some of those moments and characters in the place of the endless scenes that otherwise prevail would have been useful for telling a richer story.

The film also has an odd name, given the subject-matter. Most people in the greater Boston area think of Manchester by the Sea as a rich suburb on the North Shore, not the home of a large fishing and working-class community. Much more apropos to the setting would have been Gloucester, a few miles up the road, quite appropriately as the setting of Sebastian Junger’s moving account of a fishing tragedy, The Perfect Storm, and the moving film based on it. A bit odd, as well, is what seems like the intentional use of a non-Irish name, Chandler, for a character and a family that seem so vividly drawn from traditional Boston Irish working class characters. Maybe it’s an attempt to avoid the obvious stereotype, but it does not really succeed on that score.

Writer-director Kenneth Lonergan helped create the story and write the screenplay to Analyze This (1999), the terrifically funny classic about a mobster who goes to a therapist. It’s a classic. And, as writer and director he created You Can Count On Me (2000), a film about a sister and brother and nephew, with some interesting thematic parallels to Manchester by the Sea, but considerably lighter in a variety of respects. He also wrote the awkward screenplay for Gangs of New York (2002), the ponderous historic drama directed by one of America’s greats, Martin Scorsese.

– BADMan