Manchester by the Sea
by Johnny DiLoretto
Much has already been said about Kenneth Lonergan’s long overdue third film. By now, you’ve heard about how great Casey Affleck is in it, the wonderful chemistry he shares with his young co-star Lucas Hedges, and how utterly heart shattering, yet painfully funny the film is.
By now you’ve heard, surely, Manchester by the Sea, is Oscar bound. I’m not adding anything new to the slush pile of raves by saying that all the praise is well earned; and I’ll spare you yet another plot synopsis about New England, death, and brooding, hard drinking Irishmen.
I would just like to say that Lonergan’s debut film, You Can Count on Me, which was one of the first great films of the 21st century remains one of the best films of the past two decades. His second effort, Margaret, was widely regarded as an overly ambitious misstep but he’s assuredly regained his auteur footing with Manchester.
Like his first film, Manchester has at its core a major emotional catastrophe that defines the characters as we, where we, find them. It is there lurking behind their every motivation and gesture. But Lonnergan’s great gift is to let these people move through the mundane everyday hurdles of existence with fumbling, sometimes humorous grace, so that we can get at them and latch on to them with all their misgivings and ache-steeped, regret-soaked charm.
The filmmaker has such a gift for working in a minor key that it’s easy to overlook that he’s actually mining the great big vein of Shakespearean tragedy - love, death, guilt, rage and the rest of it. Like the final unspoken gesture at the end of You Can Count on Me, the simple four-word line “I can’t beat it,” confessionally announced with understated resignation by Affleck, resounds with such a great clanging pain you will continue to hear it long after the fade to, thematically appropriate, black.
Johnny DiLoretto co-hosts Cinema Classics for WCBE and hosts The Not So Late Show at Shadowbox Live.