Tragedy Strikes Ordinary People in "Manchester by the Sea”

If any film this year has taught us to look beneath the surface, it is Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea. Reeling from an unspoken tragedy, its misunderstood protagonist, Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), oscillates between isolation and sudden aggression. Separated from his family for some time, his gloomy routine is shaken up when he learns that his brother Joe has died of a heart attack and has entrusted him with the care of his son Patrick. Not ready to take on this role, Lee tries to sidestep it, even as he develops a bond with his nephew upon his return to his small Massachusetts hometown, Manchester-by-the-Sea.

Not until halfway through the film do we learn of the tragedy that underlies Lee’s behavior and his reluctance to be Patrick’s guardian. Some years ago, he lost his own children in an accidental house fire. He had been drinking that night with some friends and had forgotten to put up the fireplace screen before leaving the house. When he returns to find everything engulfed in smoke, Lee does not break down sobbing as one might expect. Instead, he stares with the look of a man who will be frozen in this horrible moment for the rest of his life.

Casey Affleck's talent was evident before, in Gone Baby Gone (2007) and The Killer Inside Me (2010), but as Lee Chandler, he achieves a close-to-life complexity that is possible only when an actor completely merges with his role. He strikes the same balance that made Marlon Brando such a brilliant onscreen figure: the tension between the outer shell of a loutish tough guy and the extreme sensitivity of a damaged spirit underneath, tragic and truculent in equal measure. The tense restraint of his performance is precisely what makes his unspoken past so palpable, as it rises to the stifled surface of his quaint New England hometown, where personal sufferings are often made to hide behind politeness.

Boiled down to its core, Lonergan’s film is about everyday people trying to reckon with their pasts. Its non-chronological narrative – deftly woven but avoiding obvious transitions – even mimics the sudden interruptions of memory. In one flashback, we see a woman sprawled out unconsciously on Joe’s living room couch – a glimpse, we realize, of Patrick’s now-absent mother who left him because of her drug addiction, yet still harbors hopes of reuniting with him. In another, we find Lee in his old bedroom playing with his three kids and kissing his wife as she lies in bed reading a magazine. Tragedy, we are reminded, can strike and overturn the most ordinary of lives. The film even feels like a modern-day variation on Robert Redford's Ordinary People (1980).

Manchester by the Sea is heart-wrenching precisely because it avoids a tragic tone. As Lonergan put it in his interview with Sundance, “If you start by writing about trauma, you end up writing about nothing.” Humor and idiosyncrasy insert themselves into a good many moments throughout the film, particularly into Lee’s relationship with Patrick. Lucas Hedges nails his performance as an awkward, self-absorbed high schooler whose primary concern – far from “rising nobly to the occasion” – is to keep his life the way it was before his father passed away and to find enough money to repair and maintain the family fishing boat.

The fishing boat serves as both the opening and closing shot of Manchester by the Sea, reforging the bond between Lee and Patrick and creating a circular narrative that suggests the possibility of a new chapter in Lee's life, despite the cycle of tragedy from which he will never fully escape. What seemed but a faraway dream to Lee at the beginning of the film – fishing on his brother’s boat – has, once again, become a real moment of connection with his nephew. The return to the boat might also been seen as a subtle reminder to always look beneath the surface of things. Despite the characters’ lives having drastically changed, the final shots of the harbor seemingly evoke the same untouched, small-New-England-town simplicity as the opening sequence.

Through its subtly crafted naturalism, Manchester by the Sea can be considered the culmination of what Lonergan claims is his goal as a filmmaker: “to make real life interesting enough to be dramatic, without enhancing it.”