‘Manchester by the Sea’ and the Power of Shared Experience

Midway through a film festival, people begin to play a game that largely resembles kids on the playground discussing their hockey card collections.

“I’ve got Personal Shopper, Manchester by the Sea, Koneline, and, uh...Spirit Unforgettable, what have you got?”

“Well, I’ve got Hello Destroyer, and Reset and The Love Witch.”

Like at elementary school, there is a quality of boastfulness and braggadocio, mixed with envy, competitive spirit, and that most constant of film festival interactions — the desire to squish the other guy with the weight and worthiness of your opinions.

There is something sweet and funny about this trading-type game, in which views and perspectives, for good or bad, are swapped as furiously as hockey cards once were. It is part of a festival’s importance that people feel the need to share, whether it’s trash-talking a film with your best friend, or conversing with a strange lady, who sits down beside you and demands to know how many films you’ve seen. Before you can answer, she launches into how many she has seen before expanding into a lengthy explanation of her health issues and her schedule that day. Everyone has an opinion, even if that opinion is “I am somewhat disappointed by everything.” As one woman I spoke to noted: “I’ve seen a lot of fours, but no fives so far, but fives are rare.”

She is perfectly correct: fives are indeed rare. Kenneth Lonergan’s third directorial outing Manchester by the Sea trembles on the edge of reaching a five, but a few things keep it from lifting off and flying away.

To be fair, there is a great deal to recommend in this film, most especially the performance at its centre from Casey Affleck. The younger Affleck plays Lee Chandler, a handyman/janitor who attends to the needs of apartment dwellers in a raggedy Boston neighbourhood. Our introduction to the man comes in a most inglorious fashion, as he plunges clogged toilets and fixes leaky pipes in the bleakness of a New England winter.

Immediately, it is clear that there is something horribly wrong with Lee. As he trudges along like he’s in a waking coma, a radioactive core of sadness leaks out of him, a kind of waviness in the air like a heat shimmer of emotion. It is there too in Lee’s terrible underground apartment (read: cell) that gives off a scent of animal suffering and closed-off rooms, slowly freezing over. The only time Lee comes to life is at the neighbourhood bar, where he gets caveman drunk and pounds the living shit out of two guys who were simply minding their own business. This present day introduction is tempered by flashbacks to an earlier Lee, a joking, amiable guy who teases his nephew and loves his wife and three young children with lip-smacking gusto. In scenes aboard his brother's boat, long-ago Lee faces into the ocean breeze, with the calm air of a man who loves and is loved. So, the question is immediate and profound — what the hell happened?

The film slowly provides answers as it charts a winding, circular path backwards and forwards through time. In Manchester, memory is a source of agony, something to be handled like blown glass, molten at its birth and settling into brittle permanent shape as its cools. All of this heat and containment is carried in Affleck’s performance. It is tempting to pile on superlatives, but Affleck’s Lee is truly the heart of the film, although he is a little like a black hole, a gravitational force that sucks in all light and colour. It is such a strong piece of work that I found myself somewhat worried for the actor.

When Lee gets word that his older brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) has died of congestive heart failure, he returns to his hometown of Manchester to make arrangements with the funeral home and the lawyer, and to deal with his nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges), now a giant, horny teenager. Unbeknownst to Lee, Joe has made him the guardian of Patrick, and therein begins the story of a slow return to life. Not for Joe, he remains quite dead, although the void of his presence echoes like a clap throughout. It is Lee who must undertake a slow thaw, moving from his frozen state to something resembling a shuffling step forward.

The premise of a kid, or in this case, a teenager, bringing life back to someone who has abandoned all hope of happiness has been done to death. It is a credit to Lonergan’s direction that he is able to interject new ideas into what is ostensibly a fairly conventional narrative structure. Layers of history are planed down through flashbacks, to establish the origin of Lee’s family tragedy. It works primarily because of the way the film jumbles past and present, one bleeding into the other, so that the tea-coloured seepage of grief permeates everything. There are genuine surprises along the way, most beautifully rendered in family arguments and moments of silent communication.

Joe’s condition, diagnosed some years earlier, is initially presented in a riveting scene inside a bland hospital room. The exchange between the family and the doctor, telegraphed in clipped and understated fashion, contains almost all you need to know about the family dynamics of the Chandler clan — from Joe’s horror and shock at being handed a death sentence, to his wife’s inability to cope, to the brothers’ use of dark humour to stave off despair. For a film that deals in tragedy, Manchester by the Sea is often surprisingly funny. Until, quite suddenly, it is not funny at all. When I watched the film in a full theatre, you could practically sense the audience’s feeling of remorse or, maybe more correctly, some form of self-admonishment when the horrific and unbearable central event finally comes into view.

Forgive me an aside for a moment, but I am still amazed by the experience of watching a film with a large amount of people, and what happens in a theatre when the collectivity of emotion becomes a palpable sensation. You can feel it, a huge psychic cloud, an almost extrasensory form of haptic communication that filters in through your skin. The experience can influence how you think and feel about a film, almost in spite of yourself. It takes a while to wear off, and, even now, writing about the film, the prickly feeling of other people’s emotions trickles through the nerve ending and connective tissue in my brain. I think this is why the game of trading perceptions and opinions during a festival often feels so necessary. But back to the film.

Lonergan’s cinematic intelligence is readily apparent in the scenes between Lee and Patrick, as they bumble their way into a genuine and affecting relationship. The film has the patience to let things arrive in their own time and fashion. Initially, I was a bit taken aback by the character of Patrick, who reacts to his father’s death like he got a bad mark on his math paper. The kid is far more interested in bedding two different girls, playing in his horrible rock band, and maintaining a place on the school hockey team than in contending with death. But grief has a way of sneaking up behind you, throwing a bag over your head, stuffing you in the trunk of a car and driving you to remote stretch of woods. Metaphorically, that is. For Patrick, this moment of recognition and confrontation with the finality of death arrives in the form of a frozen chicken.

In addition to his directorial acuity, Lonergan has a writer’s ear for the way that language overlaps in conversation, and for the moments when words can’t do much of anything. This is where music steps in. Here is also where my only significant critique of the film occurs. Lonergan’s decision to use Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor” in the film’s most critically important sequence seems a curious choice and I am still scratching my head over it a little. The piece is familiar not only to classical music folk, but to anyone who has been to a movie in the last 50 years. It has been used in more than 27 films including Gallipoli and Dragonslayer. Orson Welles, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Werner Herzog and Alain Resnais all made use of it. This may seem a minor quibble, but it scratched at some corner of my mind for days afterward.

Music in film is a tricky business and for all its subtly, the music in Manchester by the Sea hits a strange note. In certain places it is, quite frankly, too much, squashing the delicacy of the emotional exchanges that are carried in heavily freighted silence or conversations of single words. The mixture of pop tunes and Baroque standards (Handel also makes a major showing) is surprisingly heavy-handed. Occasionally, I felt like shushing the swelling strings so that I could hear and understand better what was happening onscreen.

There are few other odd missteps, again, most notably in the emotional scene between Lee and his former wife Randi (played by Michelle Williams). What ought to be wrenching and unbearable feels oddly unconvincing, which is doubly strange in light of the power of both Affleck and Williams.

But these critiques are not condemnatory in any way. The film retains a precision and grace throughout and even the occasional clanging bit doesn’t detract that much. In fact, it adds another level of humanity, awkward, uneven and struggling to understand, as we lurch forward in time, trailing our ragged histories behind us.

There is still time to collect more film festival cards so that you can boast to your friends and foes and opine about your experiences. The Vancouver International Film Festival runs for another week and Manchester by the Sea has one more screening yet to come, on Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. at the Centre.