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Trust Weighted
Great
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83Trust Points
Wick's Review
Summary - Great 4.0 click to collapse contents
Deaths in the family surround Casey Affleck’s New Englander, dragging him down and knocking him around in Manchester by the Sea. Kenneth Lonergan’s latest fractured-family film has been highly praised at film festivals and has Oscar buzz around it, especially for Affleck’s tortured performance. All this is right and good, even if Manchester by the Sea is not the best of Lonergan’s three family drama pictures.
That honor remains with You Can Count On Me, his filmmaking debut from 2000. But that’s not to diss his latest, with its characteristic ear for how people muddle through family dynamics in the wake of tragedy.
Casey Affleck and Kyle Chandler play brothers at the center of that tragedy. A terrible accident reduces Affleck’s convivial guy into a barely functional man, after which an untimely death forces him out of his shell, barely. It’s a terrific performance, but hardly unexpected from the better of the two Affleck actors.
Lonergan tells the story deftly, with extensive flashbacks throughout the film. He also intersperses notes about the diminished state of traditional guardrails, from the role of religion (“You know we’re Christians also, right?”) to matter-of-fact sex (“Do you want to fuck me?” offers a teen to her new boyfriend). Taken together, Manchester by the Sea is a downbeat classic from the modern master of downbeat Americana.