Watching
the film Manchester
By The Sea
is like watching paint dry at times and then you realise the
cinematic paint has dried and the picture it has formed is a
masterpiece of story, character, location and emotion.
We
are north of Boston, on the Massachusetts coast, where English names
have long replaced the native American. Here is Essex, Gloucester,
Beverly and Manchester-by-the-Sea, a tidy estuary town, surviving on
seasonal resort activity, marine engineering, some fishing and the
church, school and public administrative necessities of small town
America. We come into the lives of the Chandler family: two brothers,
their two wives and one of their sons. A web of relationships forms:
father-son, brothers, husbands-wives, friends and neighbours. The key
one is uncle-nephew.
At
the core of the film is the visualisation of the old Stoic truism
about life: stuff happens and then you die. Or, in this case, you
live.
The
matter becomes 'how do you live?'. The penultimate scene has the
uncle, played in a blindingly marvellous performance by Casey Affleck
and the nephew, aged sixteen and growing up fast, walking up a hill,
bouncing a ball between them. It escapes them and the uncle, Lee
Chandler, says 'let it go', but the boy picks it up once more, so
that the bouncing and the climbing continue, in a modern day
representation of the Sisyphus myth. As film metaphors go, this is
hard to beat. It is not a rock the mere humans toil to push uphill,
it is not a rock that permanently falls back, so that they must start
again. It is a bouncy, rubber ball that escapes them. And then the
young pick it up again.
There
is so much to admire and enjoy in this film. The performances are
terrific. The scene where Lee Chandler chances to meet - it is a
small town, after all - his estranged wife, Randi, played expertly by
Michelle Williams and they endure an aching, faltering conversation
of broken gestures, appeals, half sentences and dodged eye-contact is
a searing depiction of the limits of human empathy, in stark contrast
to earlier scenes of blue-collar, boorish bliss the couple
experienced.
This
not Newport of High Society or the Cape Cod of the Kennedy's. This is blue-collar
America, with Old Glory on the lawns of the clapboard houses,
inhabited by old stock Anglo-Protestants and later Catholic
immigrants. The young Chandler nephew, Paddy, asserts, towards the
end of the film, that he is not going to college and he is not moving
to Boston with his uncle. He likes his hometown. The final scene
shows him and Uncle Lee fishing from the back of the boat they both
love. They save the heart of the boat by putting in a new engine,
financed by selling the prize guns held by Paddy's father, who's
own heart let him down. That's a neat political point, one of a
number, gently placed throughout the film.
And
yet it is not all gentleness, no life is, certainly not the life Lee
Chandler and his wider family experience. There is grief, rage and
anger. We first meet Lee working as a janitor/handyman in apartment
buildings in Boston, with demanding and sometimes irascible apartment
owners, for whom he repeatedly performs menial tasks. He is the surly
loner, who mumbles and scowls. He is the one person you would steer
well clear off in a pub. Ironically, in that winter period of the
film, the male sport of choice is ice-hockey. Paddy plays. Lee
watches. And the players thump and wallop each other in ritualised
acts of violence, that are, at one and the same time, a public
venting of male violence and a gross display of male anger.
Nonetheless
there
is
plenty of gentle humour, in particular in the efforts of Paddy, given
a
thrilling performance by Lucas Hedges, and other young people to grow
up, literally,
in the
midst of the widespread youth experience of sex, drugs and
rock-and-roll. Paddy says I
got two girlfriends and I'm in a band and,
while it's a witty line from a sixteen year old, the cinema-goer is
left with a sense of 'here we go again'.
Could
we have less of the sea-, town-, weather- and landscapes? Yes. Could
the film be shorter? Yes. Could the time-line of winter to spring,
hardness to life, be less obvious? Yes. Could the set-up, in Boston,
before the move to Manchester-by-the-Sea, be a little brisker? Yes.
Could the use of flash-back to tell the story be clearer? Yes, a
little, though the method is generally successful, apart from one
scene where the cinema-goer felt the action dipped into 'ghost'
territory and confused Time briefly.
Overall,
this is a masterful telling of commonplace stories and
a masterful trawl through the
contingency and persistence of human life and relationships, where grief
and the facing of it in lived experiences forge the triumph that
produces not neat resolutions but the wondrous raggedness of lived
art. When Lee Chandler says I
can't beat it. I can't beat it. I'm sorry, the
cinema-goer is with him, and continues to be with him, long after the
closing credits have faded and the screen and the world have faded to
black.
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