Manchester By the Sea: On the Lip of an Abyss

There is a central scene in Manchester By the Sea, when Randi (Michelle Williams) seeks to console her ex-husband Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), assuring him he is not to blame for the personal holocaust that lay behind them, and hoping to make amends for the accusations she has hurled at him. It is an all but impossible task for both of them. Neither is quite able to look each other in the eye, but it took an astute young future filmmaker of my acquaintance to point out that one of the great feats of direction here is Lee’s inability to take his eyes off the infant in the carriage, a child of Randi’s remarriage.

Only infants and children are not guilty or accusing. No one else—none of the adults—in the story seems able to look anyone in the eye for long. Characters talk at each other, over each other, missing each other’s points. Incessantly, so that there is (at least for this aging viewer) an oppressive sense of perpetual conflict, of disjointedness verging on violence. These are redeemed—I mean that in the religious sense—by scenes of incandescent beauty: crystalline skies; a charming New England town encrusted in winter; seagulls pinwheeling in a grey mist over the water; crooked gravestones in snow; boats bobbing in the pier, heaving gently as if in slumber, or meditation; and always the sea. These are backed by a soundtrack of choral and string music—forgiving and benedictory.

Manchester By the Sea is a masterpiece of storytelling, a profound meditation on suffering, death and beauty. The horrific tragedy at the heart of this story (no spoilers here, go see the movie), singes everyone in this drama—with the exception, perhaps, of 16-year old Patrick, whose fate following his father’s death from congestive heart failure forms the plot of the film. But it has entirely consumed Lee, Patrick’s uncle. It has devoured him. He is a shattered soul, a walking ruin. Death, unadorned and unromanticized, is everywhere in this film. Lee is already walking dead, and his brother’s passage is only an occasion for dutifully tying up loose ends. “What’s he look like,” Patrick asks when Lee comes to his school to inform him of the death. “He looks dead,” Lee says. “Not bad. Just….dead.” Patrick’s father cannot be buried until spring so he rests in a frozen vault at the morgue.  “I don’t like him being in a freezer,” Patrick protests. “I don’t either,” Lee says. “But we can’t do anything about it. It’s the way it is.”

Lee’s brother has left behind a will making him Patrick’s guardian, but it’s a responsibility Lee—given the ruin he has become—cannot think about shouldering. Patrick (Lucas Hedges), handsome, impish and gentle, is the only one in the film free of the somber curse that hangs over the story. He is buoyantly alive, the source of the film’s best humor. As he boasts to his uncle who wants him to move to Boston, he has a life to live in Manchester: he’s on the hockey team, he has two girlfriends (one he has sex with and one with whom he is mainly doing “basement business,” as he explains to his uncle. “What’s that mean?” Lee asks. “It means I’m working on it”), and he plays in a rock band (an atrociously bad one). Scolding his uncle for being unable to make casual small talk with the mother of one of those girlfriends (the one he’s working on), Patrick has no problem at all speaking directly. “You can’t make boring adult conversation for a few minutes? Like `Hey, how ‘bout those fucking interest rates?’”

The resolution of this conflict (sorry, you won’t get that here, either) will not be the one we might find sentimentally satisfying; but it will be the one that works, in a human way.

In just that way does Manchester render its blessing on this story of human woe. They are trying, these characters, to work it out under a gunmetal sky, hemmed in by the sea, in the teeth of death. The guilt that consumes them, that renders them unable to look each other in the eye, may be the awareness that they haven’t deserved the beauty that surrounds them. Yet one of those redemptive scenes is a human one: gathering in the church for Patrick’s father’s funeral, family and friends and folks from the town do not hesitate to greet each other honestly—smiling, consoling, comforting, embracing. The art and craft of life is learning how to live on the lip of an abyss; mostly it’s a mess or a comedy show, and some of us fall off. But sometimes, in the right light, its beautiful.