by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was Manchester
by the Sea, a 2016 Academy Award contender
that helped get its writer-director, Kenneth Lonergan, out of the “movie hell”
he’d fallen into through the fiasco of his previous film, Margaret (bankrolled by Fox Searchlight and shot in 2005 but not
released until six years later because Lonergan and Searchlight had a struggle
over the movie’s length — the studio wanted a film no longer than 2 ½ hours and
Lonergan couldn’t figure out how to get down to that length from his “final”
cut of three hours and 20 minutes). I referenced the New Yorker piece on Lonergan, the Margaret experience (which ended with his producer suing him for
breach of contract) and his new film, and it seems as if Manchester by the
Sea has a strikingly similar plot. Margaret dealt with a teenage woman (Anna Paquin) whose life is
upended when she accidentally causes the death of a pedestrian; Manchester
by the Sea deals with a 30-something
handyman, Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), who’s carrying a burden of guilt
because when he was living with his wife and two kids, one night he put two
logs on the fireplace in the kids’ bedroom, failed to put the screen up in
front of the fireplace, and as a result the burning logs rolled out, set the
house on fire, and killed his two kids. His wife Randi (Michelle Williams)
escaped the blaze but was unable to make it upstairs to save their children;
she broke up with Lee and got involved with another man and is about to have his child. We don’t learn this until about midway through the
film, through one of the confusing flashbacks Lonergan annoyingly intercuts
with his main present-day action — yes, he’s one of those annoying directors
who keeps us confused not so much as to where we are as when we are — and the principal issue of the film’s plot is
that at the beginning Lee is racing to a hospital in Boston to see his brother
Joe (Kyle Chandler), who’s dying of congestive heart failure.
Lee runs into his
dad at the hospital but learns that Joe died an hour before he arrived, but if
you think that just because the character is dead at the outset of the film
we’re not going to see him again, you’ve got another think coming. Indeed, Kyle
Chandler is so visible in flashbacks he gets virtually more screen time than
anyone else in the cast except Casey Affleck — certainly more than either actor
playing Joe’s son Patrick (Ben O’Brien pre-pubescent, and Lucas Hedges as a
teenager), whom Lee finds himself stuck with after Joe’s will is read and turns
out to contain a specification that Lee is to raise the 17-year-old Patrick until
he turns 21 and is emancipated under Massachusetts law. The “Manchester” the
film takes place in is not the familiar one from New Hampshire but one in
Massachusetts, whose city government in 1989 rather pretentiously and
controversially changed its name from just “Manchester” to
“Manchester-by-the-Sea” — note the hyphens. Whatever Joe did for a living
(we’re not told — Kenneth Lonergan is not the sort of writer who’s going to
spell everything out for us), it was sufficiently lucrative that he could afford
a fishing boat, and the fate of the boat is a key issue in the plot as Patrick
insists they keep it and Lee says there’s no way he can afford to maintain it
on a handyman’s salary. Another issue is that Patrick predictably wants to
remain in Manchester, where he’s in the middle of high school and all his
friends (some of whom play with him in a pop-punk band called “Stentorian,”
whose rehearsal sequences are in some ways among the most interesting parts of
the film), including the two girlfriends he’s juggling, all are. Lee wants to
stay in Boston even though, as Patrick notes, there’s no particular reason why
Lee can’t look for a handyman job in Manchester — “Toilets get stopped up here,
too,” he tells his uncle. The film is a long succession of confrontations
between the two, emphasizing the burned-out nature of Lee’s character and his
inability to face up to the adult responsibilities of parenthood and emotional
connection — we spend much of the movie wondering why Lee can’t have a normal
human relationship with anybody, male
or female, sexual or not, and ultimately realize that the trauma of losing his
kids and feeling responsible for it has left him emotionally devastated and
drained.
There’s one partly funny, partly grim sequence in which Patrick brings
Lee over to his girlfriend’s mother’s house, hoping that Lee and the
girlfriend’s mom will either get it on themselves or at least carry on a
flirtatious conversation that will allow Patrick to fuck his girlfriend in
peace instead of worrying about her mom knocking on her bedroom door every two
minutes. (She’s nosy enough about her daughter we could readily imagine her
going to work for the NSA.) Earlier we’ve seen Lee at work as a handyman,
including overhearing one Black woman whose toilet he’s unsticking tell a
friend she’s talking to on the phone that she has a crush on him and would love to be having sex with him (he responds to this with a
bland look of total burned-out disinterest) and another scene with Mrs. Olsen
(Missy Yager), who takes an instant dislike to him and later complains to his
boss about his attitude. (That part of
this film seemed like a busman’s holiday to me!) Of course, our
movie-conditioned attitude is that Lee will finally break down his defenses and
accepts Patrick as both a surrogate son and a friend — that he’ll come out of
his slacker deep-freeze and accept the responsibility his late brother stuck
him with — but no-o-o-o-o, instead
Lonergan has Lee dig up another relative with whom to place Patrick and gets
the hell out of Manchester-by-the-Sea back to his shitty (literally and figuratively) job in Boston and the miserable little
basement hovel in which he lived that was given to him as part of his pay.
Charles said Manchester by the Sea
brought back memories of his childhood, which he spent at least part of in
places with actual snow (during one scene in which piles of dirty-looking snow
have accumulated beside the sidewalk from which it’s been shoveled, Charles
said, “That’s what snow looks like!
It’s not all white and fluffy; it’s dirty and brown!”), a dubious pleasure I as
a lifelong Californian have been spared.
Manchester by the Sea is the sort of frustrating movie you want to like better than you do: it’s obviously aiming for real
quality, and it’s the increasingly rare sort of movie that’s actually about
realistically depicted people in real-seeming situations instead of a battle
between superheroes and super-villains for control of the world — but I found
it sporadically moving but also rather annoying. Casey Affleck won the Academy
Award for Best Actor in this film, but while he certainly makes the character
believable he doesn’t make him especially likable and I, for one, just got tired of him well before the end. There were certainly better
performances in movies in 2016 than this one, and one of them — ironically —
was by his brother Ben in The Accountant,
a far more melodramatic and action-oriented movie than Manchester by the Sea but also a stronger piece of entertainment. (Like his
character in Manchester by the Sea,
Casey Affleck has lived his adult life in the shadow of a more successful, more
highly regarded and better-paid brother.) Casey Affleck co-starred with Matt
Damon (who produced Manchester by the Sea
and originally considered directing and/or starring in it) in Gus Van Sant’s
mercifully forgotten Gerry, easily one
of the 10 worst movies of all time, in which they both played annoying slackers who got lost on a desert hike and
wandered around aimlessly for days until they presumably both died (and we
didn’t care because they were such infuriating characters we really weren’t
sorry to see them go), and while he’s considerably better here he’s playing the
same kind of character (as Rebecca Mead put it in the New Yorker profile on Lonergan, “Lonergan’s work often has at its
center a vulnerable slacker—or, as [his wife J.] Smith-Cameron puts it, ‘a
character who is a very appealing, funny, interesting, tortured fuckup who
means well’”) — but, pace Mrs.
Lonergan, I don’t find Lee Chandler
especially appealing, funny or interesting, just tortured, fucked-up and a not
particularly pleasant person to spend two hours and 17 minutes with.
If
anything, both the most fascinating character and the best actor in this movie
is Lucas Hedges as the teenage Patrick, and one could easily imagine Lonergan
recasting this story the way Stephenie Meyer redid the Twilight novels to put Patrick and his dilemmas front and center. Hedges is almost
preternaturally gorgeous — a few years from now one could readily imagine him
starring in a biopic of President John F. Kennedy if anyone still wants to make
one about this, if anything, over-depicted
figure — and he acts with such power and authority that he gives the
impression, which Lonergan may or may not have intended, that he’s the mature one and Lee the child-man who needs his
nephew’s guidance. Michelle Williams is O.K. in a rather underwritten role that
has far less screen time than her billing (third) would indicate, though in an
early flashback between her and Affleck (which takes place after their kids
died in that fire but before we’ve been given that information) he tries to
have sex with her and she pleads she’s “sick” and fights him off — strikingly
reminiscent of her scene in Brokeback Mountain in which her husband, Heath Ledger (depicted throughout
that overrated movie as Bisexual, not
Gay!), wants to have sex with her and she says, “The next time I want you to
make a baby you can’t afford to raise, I’ll let you know.” Manchester by the
Sea is obviously a “quality” movie about
real-seeming people in real-seeming relationships; it’s just not a particularly
pleasant one to watch, the cinematic equivalent of castor oil (“Here, take
this, it’ll be good for you after all
those superhero shoot-’em-ups”), and though the people both in front of and
behind the cameras have real talent, they have an all-too-common (these days)
disinterest in creating characters audience members will actually like.
