Claire Folger/Amazon Studios/IMDB
It is not easy to produce a movie without being cliché. However, the director Kenneth Lonergan did an amazing job in “Manchester by the Sea”. Lonergan is a specialist in studies of grief, guilt, and bewilderment and we can tell that we do not watch his movies in the hope of finding a happy story.
The American drama tells the story of Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), a quiet and reserved handyman in Quincy, Massachusetts, that receives the word that his brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), had a heart attack. Arriving at the hospital too late, Lee is emotionally distant from the entire situation. He goes to his hometown of Manchester to break the news to Joe’s son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges).
Staying in Joe’s home while arranging the funeral, he is shocked to learn that Joe named him as Patrick’s guardian – and for that he has to move back from Boston to Manchester. The problem is that he is tormented by memories of his past at the city and just wants to stay away from the place. The big question is: how can a person that does not know how to deal with death raise a teenager that lost his father at such an young age?
Claire Folger/Amazon Studios/IMDB
Casey Affleck did a great job by playing Lee Chandler, a repressed, traumatised and not that expressive character. Despite the lack of communication – and some mistakes that he made in his past – he causes the feeling of empathy, especially because the resemblance that he has with our way of dealing with difficult situations. For sure, the Oscar nomination for Best Actor was a good choice.
The movies’ photography director, Jody Lee Lipes, also did an amazing job. It is really interesting how we can clearly see the difference between the sequences of the past and the present. At the flashbacks, the settings are much more happier than in the present current line, where all the scenes are more traumatic. The idea that the characters’ lives was never going to be the same at certain point of the narrative is certain delivered at the points of the story.
“Manchester by the Sea” is a movie about the lost of important people, grief and restarts – and the script is put across sensibility and humanity. Along that, it is a work about love and the way that it changes people, showing this in way that we can relate to.