In the great and overlooked 1991 comedy Soapdish, a television executive muses on the work of his network’s greatest soap opera star. “She is and will always be the Queen of Misery,” he says. Well, Celeste of Soapdish has nothing on Casey Affleck of the year’s most highly-praised film, Manchester by the Sea. If Celeste is the Queen of Misery, Affleck’s character Lee is the Prince, the Prince Regent, the Dauphin, the Duke, and the King all
rolled into one.
The movie is so exacting in its portrayal of Lee’s dreadful condition that it becomes one with its lead character. If you think the measure of a work of art is just how lousy it can make you feel, Manchester by the Sea is without question a towering masterpiece
As Manchester by the Sea begins, Lee Chandler is living the most solitary kind of life. He’s an apartment-building handyman in Boston who does good work but cannot make small talk with the tenants, and so without affect that he barely registers a tenant’s sexual interest but is still present enough to sucker-punch a fellow customer at a bar for the crime of giving him a look he doesn’t like.
One morning he receives a phone call that sends him back to his hometown, where his beloved brother (the wonderful Kyle Chandler, late of the glorious TV series Friday Night Lights) has just died of a chronic heart condition.
Over the course of the movie’s first hour, we see Lee both living alone in the present in a basement room, and in a much more cheerful condition in a series of haunted flashbacks that coexist in his mind with the present. In the past, he’s in business with his brother on a fishing boat. He’s a loving uncle to his brother’s son. And he’s living with his own tough-minded hardass of a wife (Michelle Williams) and their three small children.
We don’t yet know what happened to exile him to his Boston basement, but we know it has to be pretty bad. When the answer finally comes, it’s worse than we could possibly imagine. So it turns out that, to save Lee from his exile, his brother has reached out to him from the grave by assigning Lee the guardianship of his now-16-year-old nephew Patrick, whose mother lost custody and fled town due to severe alcoholism. Lee responds with panic at the idea, in part because Patrick is a popular kid in Manchester—a star hockey player, a teenage ladies’ man, lead guitarist of a rock band—and has no interest in relocating. But every moment in Manchester is a special agony for Lee, and he cannot bear to stay.
A more conventional telling of the story of Manchester by the Sea would take Lee and allow him to find a way back to a full life by slowly embracing his new responsibilities. But the writer and director, Kenneth Lonergan, doesn’t want Manchester by the Sea to provide easy answers to explain Lee’s grief, or provide outs for him against the justifiable guilt he feels.
In a real sense, Manchester by the Sea is an aesthetic argument against popular culture works that seek to exploit our emotions by making cheap use of unspeakable horror in their narratives. They want to enmesh us emotionally by depicting calamities, especially calamities that happen to children—and then they want those calamities to morph into meaningful learning experiences that help their characters grow. Just to take one of a million Hollywood examples, didn’t the irresponsible fashionista in Raising Helen learn to become a real woman by learning to be a good substitute mother to her dead sister’s little kids—just as her dead sister wanted?
Because we know this trope so well from every movie we’ve ever seen, we in the audience find ourselves hoping against hope that this will happen for Lee, even though his inability to get past the mind-numbing horror of his own life’s circumstances is entirely reasonable. But Lonergan, whose most notable previous work was the wonderful You Can Count on Me (2000), has an admirable horror of such vulgarity and cheap sentiment.
He wants to show the mundanity of quotidian life even in the face of tragedy: a stretcher whose legs won’t fold up as the paramedics try to put it into an ambulance; a nurse looking around desultorily for the plastic bag of Lee’s brother’s possessions in the hospital where his corpse is downstairs in a freezer drawer; a bunch of teenagers getting into an argument about Star Trek because they don’t know how to talk about death.
Alas, these sharp comic details only serve to accentuate the dreadfulness of what has happened to Lee and is happening inside him on a minute-to-minute basis. In offering this unsparing portrait of earned guilt, Lonergan is offering us a deep truth rather than a comforting pop-culture illusion. The result is an uncompromising and deeply serious piece
of work.
Still, what I want to know from Kenneth Lonergan is this: What on earth did I do to deserve this punishment on a Saturday night?
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is The Weekly Standard‘s movie critic.
