Tropic Sprockets / Manchester by the Sea

By Ian Brockway

Playwright Kenneth Lonergan’s perfect and precise “Manchester by the Sea” is a hard luck melodrama of a person besieged  with understandable demons and wrenchings of the heart. It has echoes of the gritty realism films of the 1960s, and despite its outrageous woe, it never fails to display a natural truth coupled with sincerity impossible to ignore.

Lee (Casey Affleck) is a Boston handyman with a long history of alcoholism. Lee works hard. He is dependable. But just when he is about to catch a break, he goes into a bar and starts numerous bloody fistfights.

When Lee’s brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) has a heart attack and dies, Lee is informed by a lawyer that he is now charged with guardianship of his nephew, Patrick (Lucas Hedges). This order is impossible for Lee, an alcoholic, who is dealing with the divorce of his wife, Randi (Michelle Williams) not to mention his two daughters and son.

First and foremost, credit goes to Lonergan whose flawless direction and writing shows the spiral of the man, Lee, who is up against it, despite his best intentions. Rather than a linear story, one is treated to small impressions of the young man and the circumstances that have led to his self-created confinements and fears. Like the films “Marty” and “The Days of Wine and Roses,” this is a journey of a good-hearted man who tries to rise above his addictions, his routines and patterns only to become helplessly dragged down.

Despite its often downbeat tone, the film also embodies great flashes of spirit and humor. The impulsive and nonchalant Patrick has some terrific exchanges with the often soporific and reticent Lee. This reticent soul slowly looks to his off-hand nephew to jostle him, if not into absolute happiness, at least a kind of understanding.

There is something of the underdog boxer in the character of Lee as well. When he is slugged in the face, time and again, he rises, no matter the late hour, determined to be a father-figure to his nephew. Lee often pushes himself and inwardly seethes in the hopes of someday being a capable guide. As he moves, hunched and bleeding from an unnecessary brawl past the depressed houses, Lee could be Rocky Balboa or ‘The Champ’ from the 1931 film.

This is Affleck’s best and most authentic role to date and Hedges matches him  wonderfully. Hedges’s debut performance has a quirky intensity, reminiscent of Paul Dano or a young Bud Cort. Under other hands, such pathos of family loss and death would well reach an overwhelming point and topple into absurdity, but this unflinching view of one man’s hardbitten life, no doubt peppered with happiness, makes “Manchester by the Sea” a worrisome, watchable and undeniably wistful family portrait.

Write Ian at [email protected]

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