Kenneth Lonergan (2016)
The title of Kenneth Lonergan’s new picture isn’t the easiest for audiences this side of the Atlantic. Although Manchester-by-the-Sea is a real town on Cape Ann in Essex County, Massachusetts, the name sounds to British ears like a contradiction in terms (and has a hint of Victoria Wood’s Manchesterford, the setting of Acorn Antiques). In the film’s opening scene, Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), his elder brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) and Joe’s son Patrick (Ben O’Brien), aged eight or nine, are out on the sea around Cape Ann on the family’s boat, the Claudia Marie (named for the brothers’ late mother). Joe is steering the craft; Lee and Patrick are on deck together. Lee asks his nephew, ‘If you could take one guy to an island with you and you knew you’d be safe because he was the best man and he’d keep you happy, and it was between me and your father, who would you take?’ ‘My daddy’, says Patrick. The simple answer is amusingly instant; but this economical prologue resonates strongly through the whole two-and-a-quarter hours of Manchester by the Sea.
Manchester is the Chandler family’s home town but, as the next scenes make clear, Lee now lives alone in Quincy, Boston, where he works as a caretaker and handyman in a housing project. We watch him doing odd jobs for the residents – fixing lights, unblocking toilets. The demands and comments that come his way are sometimes vexing and the irritation in Lee’s eyes is plain. We see him rise to the bait just once but, when the tenant complains and Lee’s boss (Stephen Henderson) ticks him off, we learn that this isn’t the first time. We soon discover too that keeping his counsel and his distance from people is crucial to Lee. The season is winter, actually and metaphorically: one morning, as he’s shovelling snow, Lee gets a call on his mobile. His brother has collapsed and is in hospital. Lee drives to Essex County as soon as possible but, by the time he arrives, Joe has died following a cardiac arrest (a serious heart condition was diagnosed several years previously). After a tense, stricken conversation at the hospital – with Joe’s friend George (C J Wilson) and medical staff – Lee goes to the local high school to break the news to Patrick (Lucas Hedges), who’s now sixteen and a student there. Arrangements are made for Joe’s funeral: the ground is so hard this time of year that the burial won’t take place after the service but will be delayed until the approach of spring. (In the meantime, Joe’s body will be kept in a different kind of deep freeze.) Lee visits the family lawyer (Josh Hamilton) to learn details of his brother’s will. Joe was divorced from Patrick’s alcoholic mother Elise, who has been estranged from the family for several years; the will provides that Lee will be Patrick’s guardian and assumes, the lawyer suggests, that he’ll relocate from Quincy. Lee is shocked and horrified – by the prospect of acting in loco parentis and of returning to Manchester.
Lee and Lisa, the protagonist of Kenneth Lonergan’s previous film Margaret, have more in common than phonetically similar forenames. Lisa, in a thoughtless moment, caused a fatal accident that was life-changing for her and for others. We learn, in due course, that Lee did the same – and ‘in due course’ is the operative phrase: Lonergan shows good judgment in timing the revelation of Lee’s tragedy, building up curiosity but not delaying so long that our interest becomes limited to the solution of this mystery. Margaret was fascinating not least because Lonergan struggled so hard, and often unavailingly, to move Lisa’s story forward persuasively. Whereas that narrative was linear, Manchester by the Sea moves between the present and the past, as remembered by Lee, and does so easily and illuminatingly. Although they include explanations of pivotal events in Lee’s history, the flashbacks are plausibly triggered by things that occur in the here and now, and serve as reminders of earlier happenings or conversations.
Lee stays at Joe’s house in the days following his brother’s death. Patrick has a girlfriend, Silvie (Kara Hayward), round and she stays the night. He asks Lee, in case Silvie’s parents check up, to lie that she slept downstairs rather than upstairs. The recollection in Lee’s mind that immediately follows this conversation with Patrick is of Joe, Lee and the younger Patrick returning to the house, after a day on the boat, to find Elise lying in a drunken stupor in the living room; Joe gets Lee to take Patrick quickly upstairs. But Lee’s upstairs-downstairs memories extend far beyond this one. (The continuing reverberation of images, as of dialogue, is a great strength of the film.) Lee used to be married to Randi (Michelle Williams) and they lived in Manchester with their three young children. As he tries to take in what Joe’s lawyer is telling him, Lee keeps thinking how that life ended. One night, he has some mates round to the house for beers and things get rowdy – Randi appears, complaining that she and the kids are trying to sleep, and the gathering breaks up. After the other men have left, Lee goes out to get some food from an open-all-hours store. When he returns home, the house is ablaze. As he explains to the police early the next morning, he built up a fire in the hearth downstairs before he set out for the store. Even though he’d drunk plenty, it occurred to him to wonder, as he made his way there, whether he’d put a guard on the fire and should go back to check. He didn’t and carried on walking. The three children, who were sleeping upstairs, died. Randi, on the ground floor, survived. Lee expects to face criminal charges but the police, after taking a statement, tell him he’s free to go. Lee grabs a gun from one of the officers and tries to turn it on himself. He’s overpowered and the gun wrested from his hands.
When you read news reports of terrible family tragedies, you often wonder: how do the survivors ever get over them and ‘move on’? The honest (and commercially daring) answer that Kenneth Lonergan gives in Manchester by the Sea is that they don’t. ‘An uncle is forced to take care of his teenage nephew after the boy’s father dies’ – that’s the IMDB summary of the film. A man psychologically mired in the legacy of a tragedy of his own making has cut himself off in an existence that involves minimal contact and responsibility. The basic scenario sounds familiar, even generic; it would lead you to expect the guilt-ridden, solitary central character to find renewed zest for and meaning in his life and to develop newly trusting personal relationships. This happens to only a limited extent with Lee Chandler: much of the time, he seems still to regret not only causing the terrible fire but that he didn’t manage to end it all in the police station. As Lee tells his nephew in the closing stages of the story, when it’s been decided that Patrick will be adopted by George and his wife (Jami Tennille), ‘I can’t beat it. I can’t beat it. I’m sorry’. The integrity of Lonergan’s writing and direction and of Casey Affleck’s performance is a main reason why I so much like and admire this picture. Manchester by the Sea made a big impression when it premiered at Sundance earlier this year and it’s tipped for Oscar success though I fear the integrity mentioned above will turn out to limit its appeal. (There was notably less applause at the end of the London Film Festival screening that I went to than there had been the previous day for Toni Erdmann, let alone La La Land.) The ending is only very modestly hopeful, certainly not upbeat. Audiences are liable to be disappointed by that though if you’re honest, you’ll recognise the disappointment reflects the fact that things don’t work out the way you’d have liked. You’ll accept that the film would be much more disappointing if Kenneth Lonergan copped out through an easier, less believable conclusion.
The texture of family rituals and relationships is rich, the main characters are credible and consistent: it’s perhaps because they’re so credible that their consistency never seems to be mere predictability – besides, we keep seeing them in a new light. Everyone agrees that Joe is a solid, responsible family man, even though he couldn’t prevent his marriage from failing. He has been, in the words of his lawyer, ‘typically thorough’ in making his will: making Lee sole guardian of Patrick reflects Joe’s desire to ensure his son’s welfare and, at the same time, give his brother the new parental role that Joe feels he badly needs. Lee thinks entrusting Patrick to him is thoroughly wrong-headed – look what he did to his own kids. When Lee arrives at the hospital to learn that Joe has died, the conversation quickly turns to practicalities of letting other people know, making funeral arrangements and so on. George immediately volunteers to help do things. Except for going to see Patrick himself, Lee accepts George’s help readily and with a sense of relief, though without much sign of gratitude. The mixture of fear and aggression in Lee’s face says, ‘Don’t expect me to take this on – I can’t cope with it’. In retrospect, this scene encapsulates the decisions made by Lee and by George and his wife in the longer term. It’s a good example of Kenneth Lonergan’s skill in intimating character in specific details and thereby preparing the ground for later, larger illustrations of the same trait. The interactions between people in Manchester by the Sea are true to life but the realism is never dull. Lee and Patrick spend most of the time exchanging cross words: much of this makes you laugh; none of it leaves you in any doubt how important they are to each other.
His portrait of Lee Chandler is being described as Casey Affleck’s breakout performance. That may turn out to be right in terms of recognition although Affleck’s acting here can also be seen as a natural development of his excellent work more than ten years back, in Steve Buscemi’s Lonesome Jim (2005). In keeping with Lonergan’s conception of the character, Affleck’s Lee doesn’t undergo dramatically obvious personality changes; we see, rather, a continuing personality struggling to cope with traumatic events and changes of circumstance. When an actor gets inside a character as thoroughly as Affleck does here, there’s a risk of not noticing the acting – you care too much about the person the actor has created. Yet there are wonderful things you can admire and find affecting at the same time: the movement of Affleck’s eyelids as Lee bends to kiss his brother in the hospital morgue; a moment on the boat with Patrick, in the present, that brings a smile to Lee’s face – a smile that tightens into recollection of earlier trips out on the water, recognition of what’s been lost in the intervening years. Lee’s relentless introversion makes his rare moments of physical release powerful. There are a couple of sequences in bars when he loses it. The fracas that follows in each case is exceptionally convincing: when punches are thrown in this film, they look as if they’re being thrown for real. Reviewing Manchester by the Sea from Sundance, Lanre Bakare in the Guardian found that ‘the impact of this impressive drama is suffocated by the silence and suffering of its central character’. This is seriously missing the point but Bakare’s remark may presage how others will respond to Casey Affleck’s characterisation. There’s a risk his playing will be too subtle to win an Oscar (although he’ll surely be nominated: as he was, in a supporting role, for The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)). I’ll count myself very lucky if I see a better lead actor performance this year.
Lucas Hedges has had little parts in other films (Dan in Real Life, Moonrise Kingdom, Labor Day, The Grand Budapest Hotel) but I don’t remember him in them and he’s a revelation here. Patrick – a typical teenager confronted with particular challenges – is also a substantial character. He has a cocky sense of entitlement (and a bracing sarcasm), expecting Lee to give him lifts and pocket money just as Joe presumably did – yet we get an increasing sense that Patrick insists on maintaining routines also as a means of trying to keep horrors at bay. Late one night, in the kitchen, he’s getting something out of the well-stocked freezer. Some frozen meat keeps falling out of the icebox. He bends down repeatedly to retrieve it and eventually hits his head on the open door of the freezer, as he stands back up. Until this point, Patrick has shown little overt emotion over his father’s death; the moment he hits his head, he bursts into uncontrollable sobs. Lee hears him, hurries down to the kitchen, and asks what’s wrong. Patrick says he can’t stand thinking about Joe being kept in a freezer until the burial takes place. Back in his bedroom, Patrick quietens down and reverts to narked impatience with Lee: ‘I’m calmer. Now, will you please just go away?’ ‘No’, replies Lee. It’s so right that Patrick’s outbreak of grief is caused by a combination of things – last-straw exasperation with the stuff falling from the freezer, the unexpected physical pain of hitting his head, and frozen meat that’s a horrible reminder of his father’s corpse. Lucas Hedges’s sobbing is perfectly natural and truthful. What Casey Affleck gets into the pause and the ‘No’ that follow ‘go away’ is quite something.
Patrick can also be socially charming and discreet – his father’s son. Unbeknown to Joe, Patrick was already back in contact by email with his mother (Gretchen Mol). Since Lee refuses to relocate to Manchester and he wants to stay there, Patrick considers living with Elise instead – until he goes for lunch with her and her new fiancé Jeffrey (Matthew Broderick), later described to Lee by Patrick as ‘very Christian’. Jeffrey’s temperance is helping keep Elise on the wagon but the reunion with Patrick is stillborn The awkwardness of the lunch is rather too broadly conceived but Lucas Hedges plays the scene with the intuitive sensitivity he shows throughout; Matthew Broderick, needless to say, supplies a splendid cameo. It was originally intended that Matt Damon would play Lee but he pulled out as a result of scheduling conflicts. Damon and Hedges (who also has a look of the teenage Jamie Bell) have similar colouring – there’s a slight similarity too in their faces in profile. They could pass for father and son, which might have made it too obviously ironic that Lee and Patrick are not that. It works better that Lee and Joe are both dark-haired, and that Patrick has inherited his fairer hair from his mother.
As Joe, Kyle Chandler maintains his run of first-rate supporting performances (The Spectacular Now, The Wolf of Wall Street, Carol). He’s the ideal actor to play a man who is posthumously very present in the minds of those close to him: Chandler is so vividly truthful that, in spite of his limited screen time, he stays with the viewer too. He’s especially good in the sequence in which Joe, in a hospital bed, receives the grim prognosis for the heart disease that will kill him a few years later. Kenneth Lonergan dependably ensures that a scene tells us more than a single thing: we also get from this one an insight into the tensions within Joe and Elise’s marriage, and the conciliatory role that Lee and Joe’s father Stan (Tom Kemp) attempts to play. (By the time Joe passes, his father, as well as his marriage, has died.) Every role is carefully cast and well played. Lonergan himself is spot-on in a thirty-second cameo, as a pompous local who walks past Lee and Patrick while they’re arguing and comments sarcastically, ‘Great parenting …’
This deeply sad story, which many will find miserabilist, is full of humour – in the things people say to each other and, in the film’s most obviously comic episode, the things they don’t say. Patrick is juggling two girlfriends, there’s Sandy (Anna Baryshnikov), as well as Silvie. Sandy’s mother Jill (Heather Burns) tries to bring Lee out of his shell, inviting him in for a meal, and so on. ‘She really likes you’, Patrick tells Lee – and tries to exploit this by persuading his uncle to have a drink with Jill downstairs, while he and Sandy get on with ‘homework’ in Sandy’s bedroom. Lee’s taciturnity drives Jill mad and upstairs, thus interrupting the lovemaking. On the car journey home, Patrick reprimands Lee the way you’d sooner expect an adult to tell off a teenager: couldn’t you make an effort to be sociable, just for a couple of hours? Patrick plays in a band with Sandy and a couple of the boys from his high school. The group’s name is announced in their standard intro: ‘We are Stentorian’ – it’s a middle-aged joke though I (therefore) enjoyed it. Lonergan often combines funny and serious to great effect, as in an exchange involving Lee, Patrick and the unfailingly decent George:
George: Whatever you decide, he can always stay with us if he wants to come up weekends.
Lee: D’you want to be his guardian?
George: Well-
Patrick: He doesn’t want to be my guardian, for Christ’s sake, he’s got-
George: We already got a houseful – to be honest, we’re trying to lose some kids at this point …
In the flashbacks to Lee’s married life, Michelle Williams’s pretty, somewhat whingy Randi is unremarkable. She and Lee seem to enjoy their physical relationship more than other aspects of each other’s company but the marriage is secure enough before the fire. It’s in the scenes in the present that Williams’s acting really takes off (and hits the heights). When Joe dies, Randi phones Lee to express her condolences; she attends the funeral with her new husband Josh (Liam McNeill), by whom she’s now pregnant. Randi’s emotionality at the church is a foretaste of a poignant chance meeting between her and Lee in the street some weeks later, when she has her new baby in a pram. The brimming confusion of feelings between Randi and Lee in this scene is beautifully expressed by Michelle Williams and Casey Affleck. It’s the climactic example of one of the sustained virtues of Manchester by the Sea (as also of Margaret): there’s always lots happening emotionally with Kenneth Lonergan’s characters – through their words and their silences. Lee can’t bring himself to talk to anyone about his past life and fatal error. Patrick never says a word to his uncle about it, even though you sometimes see it’s in the boy’s thoughts.
Lonergan had already proved himself an outstanding writer of dialogue with You Can Count on Me and Margaret. The characters in Margaret often let rip; in Manchester by the Sea, Lonergan shows a masterly understanding of the consequences of not speaking your mind and, in particular, of how struggling to avoid saying the wrong thing usually guarantees saying it. The grim comedy comes through in sights and non-verbal sounds as well as words: the ambulance men struggling to put the gurney carrying Randi into the ambulance after the fire; Patrick and Silvie’s getting their breakfast as Lee tries to talk on the phone to the undertakers; Patrick’s mobile going off during the funeral service. The major flaws in the direction of Lonergan’s previous film are relatively very minor here. In Margaret, he didn’t seem to know what to leave out and the whole picture, even after the drastic surgery that was eventually done on it, seemed swollen and misshapen. Here, there’s just the odd sequence that goes on too long. This failing on Lonergan’s part is forgivable anyway: he gets so much going between his actors that cutting things must be hard.
The restrained gravity of Jody Lee Lipes’s cinematography is very effective and Lonergan often achieves strong impact by shooting people from further away than might be expected: the literal distancing chimes with the way Lee Chandler lives his afterlife. While Lesley Barber’s original score isn’t obtrusive, the use of well-known classical music, particularly Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor, is problematic. Even if it had prior connotations for Lonergan, this music may well have acquired stronger emotional meanings for him as part of the sequences that it accompanies in the film, and which the director will have seen repeatedly. It’s not the same for the viewer experiencing these sequences for the first time: the familiar music seems to be pre-interpreting what’s on the screen, occasionally threatens to upstage it. But only occasionally. Of the seven films I saw at this year’s LFF, Manchester by the Sea was the undoubted highlight. I’m so much looking forward to a second viewing when this fine, complex drama goes on release in Britain early in the New Year.
9 October 2016