Manchester by the Sea

Writer and director Kenneth Lonergan is a modern demi-god of both vocations. His latest, “Manchester by the Sea,” is the result. It’s the best film of 2016. 

That was an unlikely path to tread for the New York-born writer of “The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle” and “Analyze This.” But in between those two curiosities, he wrote and directed his acclaimed first feature, “You Can Count on Me,” which won a slew of critic’s awards, and was ultimately nominated for a Best Screenplay Oscar in 2000. After a decade-long hiatus (aside from helping to pen 2002’s “Gangs of New York”) Lonergan returned with “Margaret.” Both films exhibited a playwright’s eye for realist melodrama, leavened with a deadpan, wickedly East Coast sense of humor that enhances the complexity of his character’s tribulations like salt that brings out the sweetness in a perfectly baked cookie.

“Manchester by the Sea” is the pinnacle of Lonergan’s novelistic ambitions.

Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) learns that his brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler) a Massachusetts fisherman, has suffered a heart attack. A loner working as a janitor at a Boston apartment building, Lee is clearly divorced from happiness and perhaps even his will to live. 

He swiftly returns to his coastal hometown of Manchester-by-the-Sea, only too late to say goodbye to Joe. As he tends to the arrangements for his brother’s funeral, Lee discovers that Joe’s last will contains one final, non-negotiable decree—that he become the guardian of his teenage son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges).

Torn between an unspoken scar from his past—hinted at by the whispers and judgmental stares of his former townsfolk—and the desire to do his brother’s bidding and keep Patrick away from his alcoholic mother (Gretchen Mol), Lee is forced to revisit the life he left behind, and stubbornly redeem himself for the one he has inherited.

Sounds like a simple thing, but it’s not. A near-perfect film, Lonergan is an emotional watchmaker. Even the smallest interactions and ephemeral scenes reveal something deeper within his characters, no matter how briefly. Derek Cianfrance dreams of being this good. A transcendent amalgam of omniscient editing (by Jennifer Lame, who is anything but), peerless writing, and gorgeous cinematography by “Girls” alum Jody Lee Lipes, “Manchester by the Sea” is undiluted cinema.

It helps that Lonergan’s cast is uniformly sublime. In any other movie Casey Affleck’s portrayal of Lee would dim the stars around him. He’s amazing here, mining emotional territory that belies his superficial ‘Fleckness. This isn’t “Good Will Hunting” no matter its Boston bona fides. And despite the melodrama, there isn’t a shred of artifice. Be it the tragic circumstances of Lee’s life, the indelible bond he forms with Patrick in the aftermath of yet another mutual loss, or the reckoning that comes once he’s compelled to face his demons, Affleck is the gravitational force around which the macrocosm of Lonergan’s characters orbit. 

Chandler, Hedges, Mol, and Michelle Williams (as Lee’s ex-wife) soar. They aren’t just given moments to exist. They shine, bringing a power to their roles that impart a perfectly imperfect balance to Lee’s universe. Peripheral cameos from Tate Donavan and Josh Hamilton are the unexpected comets passing by.

Lonergan hasn’t just crafted a character study of a working-class man laid low by crushing circumstance. He’s created an ensemble: an organic, living web of tangible characters, temporal connections, and their sense of place in a world that recalls the naturalist joys of Altman at his best, fused with a dark gallows humor that is Lonergan’s own. “Manchester by the Sea” is an American New Wave masterpiece resurrected in the afterlife of here and now. I could live inside this movie.

For more from Joe, read his review of Nicolas Pesce’s macabre feature debut, “The Eyes of My Mother.”