Manchester by the Sea

A shattering and surprisingly hilarious study of death, guilt and family centred on a revelatory performance by the good Affleck brother

Film Review by Jamie Dunn | 03 Jan 2017
Film title: Manchester by the Sea
Director: Kenneth Lonergan
Starring: Casey Affleck, Lucas Hedges, Michelle Williams, Kyle Chandler
Release date: 13 Jan
Certificate: 15

Kenneth Lonergan films centre on fatal accidents. You Can Count on Me, a car crash. Margaret, a bus crash. In Manchester by the Sea – an equal to those two masterpieces – it’s a whole life that crashes in.

That life is Lee’s, played by a bulked-up Casey Affleck. At the beginning of the film he’s a cantankerous janitor living in a spartan bedsit. His pastimes are drinking and starting bar fights. This self-lacerating existence is interrupted both by flashbacks to happier times that seamlessly drop into the narrative and the death of his older brother, Joe (Chandler).

The latter event brings Lee back to his hometown, the New England fishing village of the title, which Lonergan films like it’s a Caspar David Friedrich seascape: cold and distant but swelling with emotion, just like Lee. As this taciturn loner sets about dealing with the funeral arrangements (they must wait for a thaw to bury Joe) and taking legal guardianship of Joe’s teenage son (Lee needs to do some thawing of his own before contemplating that prospect) the flashbacks to his past continue, allowing us to piece together what happened to this once jovial family man.

In less masterful hands, this slow reveal might have felt manipulative. What makes Manchester by the Sea much more than a Oscar-chasing tearjerker is its fine-grained performances and jet black humour, most of which stems from the prickly relationship Lee forms with his nephew Patrick (Hedges). The horny teen is brilliantly abrasive, and not about to let his sad-sack uncle get in the way of him chasing girls.

A glorious Michelle Williams appears briefly as Lee’s ex-wife Randi, and she’s like an atomic bomb of emotion. Even better is Affleck, who keeps Lee’s pain buried deep, his high voice sounding like it’s about to crack at any moment. Lonergan does something similar by avoiding those cathartic outpourings so overused in Hollywood dramas. Scars can’t heal, only fade imperceptibly. Manchester by the Sea shows that the same goes for heartbreak.


Released by StudioCanal