Manchester by the Sea - 2016
This was my best picture of 2016. Now, I’m not sure if it says something rather morbid about me that I’ve selected such a “downer” for such a prestigious honor. But, this one hit all the right notes (yes, that’s a jab at the actual musical from this year). It’s so much like real life, it’s scary. By that I mean, well, several things really. First, Manchester is chock full of full-bodied characters who are so well-drawn and so nuanced that they could be your neighbor. Second, though it features big name actors (some doing their career best work), the writing is such that they appear very naturalistic. This is a film stripped of stardom, and beating vibrantly with the rhythms of everyday New England life.
The inciting incident of the drama is the sudden death of Lee Chandler’s brother. After hearing the news, Chandler (played masterfully by Casey Affleck) soon hears something even more surprising – his brother has made him the sole guardian of his nephew Patrick. With that, Affleck is forced to move back to the town he left. It becomes clear to us very early on that he left for good reason, and though the mystery of the “why” behind this remains, we sense the tragedy lurking behind his past decision.
This all comes to a head a little under halfway through the picture when the past is finally revealed to us. (It is obscured from us and divulged over time through a clever plot device of splicing past vignettes amongst the present narrative). The tragedy is absolutely crushing and devastating in the worst ways possible. In a flash, we recognize how the vivacious Lee of the opening credits has become a hollowed out shell of a man, aimlessly fixing apartments in Boston.
Here also, we see once again the brilliant flourishes of Kenneth Lonergan’s writing. For the tragedy once revealed doesn’t slow or stall the picture, but instead leads to plumbing new depths of the characters’ lives and motivations. Indeed, Lonergan’s script, alongside Affleck’s performance, is the real jewel of Manchester. It is at once painfully and devastatingly tragic, and yet filled through with wit and downright funny moments. Again, I argue, it is just like life.
I could go on, but I’ll end with a description of one more scene. It is my favorite of the entire film, and likely the one which gained Michelle Williams her Oscar nomination. It takes place in the film’s present, long after tragedy has befallen the characters’ lives. Many films, it seems, and actors too acquire their Oscar hardware from that one big scene, that one tremendous monologue. That one…Oscar moment. And, if this film were going to have one, this would surely be it, as at long last the estranged couple comes face to face once again.
What happens instead? There is emotion aplenty, to be sure, but not of the grand, shouting and pontificating kind. Rather, it is two deeply human individuals trying to grapple with the massive weight of loss and to find the right words to apologize, or reconcile, and find the strength to continue. In this way, the scene functions like an anti-Oscar moment. It is to those enormous, emotive scenes not unlike what the negative is to a Polaroid. This is the genius of Lonergan – an uncanny ability to explore love, loss, and the peculiarities of human connection without the fanfare of more grandiose pictures, but rather through his own beautifully realized, muted aesthetic.
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