Manchester by the Sea

My Mea Culpa

Here’s a post about this week’s episode of Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics.  We choose the films almost at random: one of us will watch (or rewatch) something and text the other guy.  We then record without any previous conversation, recreating the enthusiastic conversations people have in the cars on the way home from the theater.   We also take requests, so leave a comment below if there’s a film you’d like us to cover.  We’ve done over 250 and you can find them all here.  Spoilers always abound.

When Mike, my co-host on Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics, texted me, “I watched Manchester by the Sea,” I was exasperated because we were supposed to do an episode on Run Lola Run.

Never one to give up on a movie he loves, Mike kept going:

Finally, he said the Fifteen-Minute Film Fanatics equivalent of “I triple-dog dare you”:

We all know the feeling of being pleasantly surprised by a book or film that turned out to be better than we expected.  Manchester by the Sea isn’t simply better than I expected—it was not what I expected at all.  The poster, the title, and the cast all suggested to me a precious film about Very Vulnerable People managing some kind of emotional hardship that they sort out in front of the background of a photogenic fishing village.  The plot as described on IMDB (“A depressed uncle is asked to take care of his teenage nephew after the boy's father dies”) conjured up scenes of male bonding as two guys took care of a boat, restoring it to its former glory and, shucks, learning that they have more in common than they suspected.   There would be montages, beer drank from bottles, and the tossing of a football.

I was so very wrong. And it was great to be as wrong as I was, because this is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a long while.  

But I must add a caveat to my mea culpa and state that the movie was misleadingly billed.  Take a look at this poster:

Everything here is what my kids call “sus.” We have two good-looking people trying to look “regular” in their denim. The title, the gulls, the powder-blue sky, and the blurbs only drove me further away: each phrase of praise struck me as corny as the film I imagined it was describing. Did they lose love, only to find it among the docks? Did they find that a boat could be a symbol of a relationship? To quote Mike, No and No.

As a film that offers viewers a stomachache that gets worse every fifteen minutes, Manchester is right up there with Kurt Kuenne’s 2008 documentary Dear Zachary.  One of the many things that makes Dear Zachary so powerful is that we watch the actual participants in Zachary’s story share their stories and grief with us directly.  It’s raw, it hurts to watch, and the film isn’t one you recommend casually to your friend at work who says, “Hey—you like movies. What’s something good we can watch on Friday night?” Manchester has a number of scenes that upset the viewer like the ones in Zachary—but what’s incredible is that, despite our knowing that none of what we are seeing is documentary footage, we cannot but help being moved. 

In Hamlet, the prince watches an actor cry as he recites a monologue about the Trojan queen Hecuba witnessing the slaughter of her husband. After the actor exits, Hamlet dwells upon the power of art: 

Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wann’d,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in’s aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing!
For Hecuba!
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?  

What are Lee Chandler’s children to Casey Affleck, that he should weep for them?  Like Hamlet, this film reminds us of the mysterious power of art by demonstrating how it works on a viewer.

What’s Hecuba to him?

This film is filled with details taken from real, lived experience that are seldom seen in movies touted as “realistic.”  When Lee gets the call about Joe, we see him complain about someone’s driving on an exit ramp.  After Joe dies, we see his friend Georgie apologize to the nurse for crying.  The desk nurses at the hospital can’t find the bag of Joe’s belongings.  Patrick almost gets out of Lee’s car while Lee hits the gas.  Lee and Patrick leave the funeral home and forget where they parked; later, he and Patrick argue about whether his mother’s house is on Pigeon Hill Street or Pigeon Hill Road.   Patrick’s phone vibrates during the funeral.  Collectively, these details add to the experience of Manchester by adding to the illusion that Lee and the others are as real as Zachary’s grandparents in Kuenne’s documentary.

The film does equally well with its big, excruciating moments, of which there are at least three. The scene in which Lee's ex-wife (Michelle Williams) asks him if they can have lunch is one of the most powerful scenes of the last ten years.  What begins as a simple request quickly (and wholly unexpectedly, for the characters and viewers) becomes a confession, a plea for forgiveness, a gesture toward absolution, and an illustration of two people whose past has damaged them to the point where moving forward is impossible.  When Samuel Johnson finished his editorial notes for the final scene of Othello in which the Moor strangles his beloved Desdemona, Johnson wrote, “I am glad that I have ended my revisal of this dreadful scene. It is not to be endured.”  One could misread that as a complaint but Johnson meant it as the highest praise, finding the scene simply too moving, too good, literally unendurable.  This scene with Lee and Randi is also dreadful and unendurable—fascinatingly so.  

It is not to be endured.

The title initially struck me as saccharine as I imagined the rest of the movie.  But it’s perfect: like Chinatown, Gotham, or The Overlook Hotel, the town of Manchester by the Sea is a locus of pain, a place where terrible things have happened and will continue to happen because, as Faulkner told us, the past is never dead; it’s not even past.  The ways in which Lonergan springs the flashbacks upon the viewer emphasizes the idea that Lee cannot go home again: in hundreds of other movies we’ve covered, the flashbacks are occasions for fun or clues in which the viewer gets another piece of the overall puzzle.  Here, there are, as Arthur Miller said about Death of a Salesman, no flashbacks, since the memories of what Lee has done are as real to him as the toilets he unclogs or the bare room in which he lives as a penance he can never fulfill.  He’s Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner surrounded by New England Wedding Guests. 

This is a movie of artistic and psychological integrity.  Lonergan doesn’t allow for an easy answer to Lee’s pain because there isn’t one.  The entire film is a series of scenes in which events and other people try to pull Lee back into the world of the living, but he’s a dead man walking.  Saying “I can’t beat it” is the closest he gets to moving his own needle a millimeter or two on the pain scale. As Good As it Gets ends with the once-miserable Jack Nicholson acknowledging the pleasures of being awake before dawn to buy warm rolls from a bakery, but to Lee Chandler, that bakery will never open. 

And even if it were, he would never allow himself to enter it.  

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