Manchester by the Sea (3/5 Stars)

Lee Chandler (played by Casey Affleck) works as a janitor in a housing project in Boston. He fixes stuff and doesn’t take shit from the tenants. His boss excoriates him for not taking shit from the tenants. Lee Chandler points out that he’s cheap, he does good work, and he knows about a bunch of illegal stuff the boss does on the side. “So do what you have to do,” he says. Lee doesn’t care if he gets fired. He goes to a local bar at night. Women try to hit on him but he doesn’t respond. He starts a fight later on that night. Lee doesn’t really have a problem with the other guy. He wants to get punched in the face.

There is tragedy in Lee’s past. As the particular nature of it is only revealed half-way through the movie, it is technically a spoiler. But given that it seems to be the premise of Lee’s character and various flashbacks point to a wife and three children that are no longer there, you can take a guess at what happened. My guess was that Lee got drunk and while driving everyone home from a party somewhere he got them all killed in a car crash. I wasn’t too far off.

“Manchester by the Sea,” is the name of the town where this tragedy took place and where the people from his past still live (or are buried). Lee doesn’t visit. And when he does its because something bad has happened, specifically his brother, Joe Chandler (played by Kyle Chandler) is in the hospital. Joe has congenital heart disease and every once in awhile collapses and is taken to the hospital. In the opening scenes of this movie, Joe collapses and dies. Lee goes to Manchester by the Sea where he sees Joe’s friends at the hospital and picks up Joe’s teenage son, Patrick (played by Lucas Hedges) from hockey practice.

At the will reading, his brother throws him a curve ball. The will says Lee Chandler will be Patrick’s guardian. This is something Joe although he knew he would die soon, did not inform Lee of because as Lee puts it, “he knows I would have never agreed to it. Being guardian to Patrick necessarily entails Lee moving back to Manchester by the Sea and trying to live with the tragedy. The story is well written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan who treats his subject with patience, care, and good humor. Casey Affleck’s performance is perfect and a scene he shares with his ex-wife, Randi, played by Michelle Williams, is one of the saddest scenes in movies. (Michelle Williams, it is fair to say, is underused in the movie but when she is on screen, she captivates).

As a slice of life or character study, “Manchester by the Sea” is as good as it gets. But its tragic centerpiece calls for something more than a glimpse into the lives of these people. Kenneth Lonergan owes us some theory on what it all means or what the next correct step is in Lee’s life. This the movie does not provide. The tragedy occurred for no particular reason and Lee’s life has no particular lesson to teach us. It’s okay for comedy to be pointless, but tragedy needs something more. Lonergan made me cry a little, he owes me that.  

 Perhaps a good idea would have been to tell two parallel stories. One for Lee and the other for Randi. After all, Randi got remarried and had another kid. How she accomplished that in the wake of the tragedy while Lee couldn’t would be interesting and instructive to see.