Caretaker Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) is going round the bend. Literally. With one hand down the shitter and the other fending off unwanted advances from an amorous tenant, he retires to a hostelry of “poker players and loose women” where a clumsy local accidentally showers him in beer and two suits end up on their backsides for the crime of “What the fuck are you looking at me for?” He scrimps and scrapes on the minimum wage, his basement apartment is as welcoming as a morgue and his ex-wife Randi (Michelle Williams) lives up to her name and is “ready to pop” with another man’s child. As I said, caretaker Lee Chandler is going round the bend.
But what, or rather who, he is taking care of suddenly changes when he receives a call from the hospital to say that his brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) has just died of congestive heart failure and that he is now the legal guardian of his 16-year-old nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges) whose level of maturity can be gauged by the retort “Fuck my fucking ass” and whose hormones are raging over not one but two girls. His chances of bedding the most recent one Sandy (Anna Baryshnikov), whom he describes as “basement business” aka “I’m working on it”, are wholly dependent on Lee “working on” and distracting her overprotective mother Jill (Heather Burns) so that he can engage in the extracurricular activity euphemistically referred to as “banging out those compound fractions”.
Humour aside (though there’s plenty of it, of the gallows variety), Manchester By The Sea by Kenneth Lonergan, in only his third directorial outing after You Can Count On Me and Margaret, is a gratifying slow-burner, which treads delicately around the issues of grief and guilt as Lee, Patrick and others try to rebuild their lives after a series of sudden and tragic events threaten to push them not by but into the sea. This is life with the rose-tinted glasses removed, thrown to the ground and stamped upon. Shit happens. Sometimes there is nothing we can do to prevent it from happening, little we can do to comfort those that it is happening to and no road map or rule book to show us “the way and the truth and the life” after it happens. All we can do is be there for one another when it does.
There is a brief scene near the start of the film which on first glance appears to serve no other purpose than to humorously introduce the audience to the character of Lee and his humdrum existence, but upon reflection takes on a deeper meaning and acts as a metaphor for the entire film. It occurs during a series of exchanges between Lee and some residents from the four blocks of flats that he is responsible for maintaining. There’s the aforementioned amorous woman who wants to whip off his boiler suit and engage in a raunchy rendition of Steamy Windows. And, among others, there’s an old man having a problem with his plumbing. No pun intended.
“You need a new stopper,” Lee informs him. “Or you might want to consider replacing the whole apparatus.” For “stopper” read booze, baseball and a braindead job to block out the pain. For “stopper” read Lee as a temporary guardian reluctant to commit to anything permanent. His wife and kids were a permanent fixture in his life; now both are gone. As is his brother who was universally described as solid and dependable, but is now just solid as his corpse has had to lie in a morgue freezer for weeks on end because the ground has been too cold and hard to bury him. And for “whole apparatus” read the complex network of pipes which constitute Lee and Patrick’s lives and which need to be ripped out and rebuilt from scratch.
There is no “and they all lived happily ever after”. There is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. There is no knight in shining armour to whisk them off their feet. There is no fairy with a magic wand to make all the bad things disappear. There is only life and what it throws at us. And the closest Lonergan comes to delivering a “message” comes in the final line of the film when Lee says to Patrick just before he is about to chase after a ball which he has accidentally dropped and is rolling away from him down a steep hill: “Let it go.” The ball is the past, the pain. The hill is their future. Onwards and upwards? Backwards and downwards? Fade to black.
Given the sombre subject matter, you might be forgiven for booking a one-way ticket to Dignitas. But think again for Manchester By The Sea is wickedly funny in a quiet and understated way. For example, when Patrick freaks out at the thought of his dad’s body lying in a morgue freezer, Lee’s tactless reply is as black as black humour can be: “If you’re going to freak out every time you see a frozen chicken, I think we should go to the hospital.” And their dry exchange about Lee lacerating his hand after punching a hole in the window is class. “What happened to your hand?” “I cut it.” “Well, for a minute there, I didn’t know what happened.”
Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges are terrific as the oddest of odd couples. Think Bill Murray and Jaeden Lieberher in St. Vincent only with more depth and fewer laughs. And it is little wonder that both have been nominated for an Academy Award, along with Michelle Williams for Best Supporting Actress, Kenneth Lonergran for Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, and the producers who include Matt Damon for Best Picture. La La Land is odds-on in most categories, but given Affleck’s incredibly nuanced performance in revealing nothing and yet at the same time everything about a character whose feelings are buried so deep that you would need a stick of dynamite to unearth them, it wouldn’t surprise me if he added to his recent success at the Golden Globes.
But, above all, credit must go to writer/director Kenneth Lonergan whose previous screenplays Analyse This and Analyse That (the latter of which would drive you to analysis) are a far cry from the intelligent, complex and subtle nature of Manchester By The Sea. Sometimes he lets the words tell the story, often in an off-beat comedic manner as when Patrick’s estranged mother Elise (Gretchen Mol), a recovering alcoholic and born-again Christian, struggles to hold it together at the dining table and requires her new partner Jeffrey (Matthew Broderick) to dig her out of a hole with: “Your job is to relax. Ok? That is your A-Number-One assignment.” And sometimes he lets an image or a series of images, accompanied by a carefully chosen piece of classical track, tell the story. My highlight being a flashback sequence lasting the whole length of Tomaso Albinoni’s moving composition “Adagio in G minor”. The film, though, is anything but G minor. More A going on A plus.
Video courtesy of: Amazon Studios
Director: Kenneth Lonergan
Writer: Kenneth Lonergan
Stars: Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler
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