While it may not end up in my top five movies of the year, Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea was almost perfect. I said the same thing when I started my review for Nocturnal Animals a week ago. Both movies could potentially be serious contenders, but both had some serious holes. While Nocturnal Animals will likely not receive any nominations com, Manchester by the Sea will likely earn multiple ones. Manchester by the Sea will likely finish as one of my five favorites of the year, but boy, did it have the possibility to be number one.

If you haven’t seen the trailer for the upcoming movie Fences, you need to stop reading this review and watch it right now before reading it. Denzel Washington could win the Best Actor Academy Award based on this trailer alone. The only other time I made this claim was in 2012 when Daniel Day-Lewis made you think you were watching Abraham Lincoln on the screen while you were watching the trailer for Lincoln. While Lincoln was not a movie I particularly enjoyed, Day-Lewis’s performance was worth the price of admission alone. He won the Best Actor award in a landslide. I mention that because I saw a more captivating performance in a preview of Washington’s Fences. Even last year, when Leonardo Dicaprio ran away with acting’s top prize for his portrayal as a vengeful frontiersman/fur trader/hunter in The Revenant, his performance wasn’t leaps and bounds better than anything else. In fact, Eddie Redmayne’s performance in the trailer The Danish Girl looked more impressive.

How is this relevant to Manchester by the Sea? It’s important because Casey Affleck is likely the only threat to Denzel Washington winning the Best Actor award. Affleck’s performance would have been good enough to win in many years. Plus, Affleck was nominated only once, almost a decade ago. Unfortunately, the Academy thinks a nomination for some actors is the same as a win for others. You want the winners to be the best in each category, and while sometimes the Academy gets its wrong nominees, it usually gets its winner correct.

Casey Affleck is the best thing about the extraordinary but arguably flawed Manchester by the Sea. I still don’t think the typical moviegoer realizes how terrific Affleck is as an actor. He is much more than Ben Affleck’s little brother. Many would say that Casey is better than Ben. But, if nothing else, he’s narrowing the gap. I’ll even go as far as to say that this is the best brother acting combination ever on film. While this may seem bold, there aren’t many other duos. Sure, you’ve got Jeff and Beau Bridges, Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez, and Alec Baldwin and whichever of his other three brothers you’d like to pick. Casey has delivered exceptional performances in movies such as Gone Baby Gone, The Finer Things, Triple 9, The Killer Inside Me, Out of the Furnace, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (the movie in which he did receive an Oscar nomination for). While most people haven’t heard of these films, they are all worth watching, and the main reason I believe in them is because of how good Casey Affleck is in them.

In Manchester by the Sea, Affleck does everything right as the guilt-stricken Lee Chandler, a down-on-his-luck apartment complex utility man who hasn’t been able to move on from an event that happened to him before our introduction to his character in this film. To not spoil this component of the movie for you, I will say that the event that changed his life was so traumatic that he had to change his life and start over. Lee moved from his hometown of Manchester, a New England fishing village where nearly the entire movie is shot, an hour and a half drive from Boston. Lee is so sick with grief that he believes he’s beyond recovery and has convinced everyone close to him of this as well. Imagine the worst thing that could happen to a person, realize it was your fault, and then be told it was okay because it was an accident. This becomes Lee’s situation. He wears the pain on his face every single moment of every single day, but he never breaks down. In an interview, I heard Affleck say that he’s like a dam that keeps cracking, but if you just let it crack, all the water comes out, and there’s no tension left. So, instead, his character has to hold it all in all the time. When little cracks form, you keep covering them and covering them, and that’s all the scenes in the movie for Lee.

There is self-loathing in Lee that you don’t see in movies anymore. While he’s the central figure, he’s not in every scene. That speaks more to just how far down he reached to develop this character. He works a job where he barely earns minimum wage and doesn’t care whether he’ll be at that job the next day or if he gets fired. While he is a good handyman, plumber, and show-shoveler who works between a handful of apartment complexes, he struggles to hold his emotions in. I wouldn’t say he struggles to keep his feelings in as much as he doesn’t care. Almost every little nuisance has the chance to set him off, and when he gets set off, he doesn’t hold back. The only reason he can keep his job after repeated incidents of verbally abusing some of the tenants is that he’s good at what he does, and his property manager knows it. So, rather than making Lee apologize to the people he’s offended (because he knows Lee won’t), he does so himself. You feel like there could be more for Lee regarding a vocation, but you’re not sure he believes he deserves anything more than minimum wage jobs that also provide a studio apartment free of charge.

Lee does not have alcoholism, but he does like to drink. Alcohol plays a pivotal role in this movie. Lee doesn’t use alcohol so much to unwind as he does to forget. It also allows him to get in fistfights more easily, striking others physically for no reason, knowing that he will soon be outnumbered by those he is choosing to fight with. It’s almost as if he’s starting these fights because he knows he’ll get beaten raw, and he believes this is what he deserves. Lonergan gets us to know Lee before introducing anyone else in the film. We see him cleaning toilets and throwing trash in dumpsters. We see him have a beer after work. We see that he doesn’t know how to talk with people professionally and has no meaningful relationships in his personal life. Why is this? Well, we don’t know that. Lonergan is masterful in building intrigue and spends much time focusing on Lee’s current life, but certainly not too much.

Lee doesn’t let the duties of caring for his nephew completely derail him. He is always searching for the right thing to do. Lee knows Patrick wants to stay in Manchester, and that’s where he belongs, but Lee can’t find a way to return home permanently. Everywhere he turns, he sees torment. People stop and stare when they see him. He’s perceived as an outcast by everyone in the city and persecuted by those who don’t even know him. The suffering he feels doesn’t even feel like acting. He is so invested in Lee, and his misery pours out of him for 135 straight minutes. This movie isn’t wrapped up in a nice little bow by the end. The emotions are real. Time doesn’t heal all wounds. Life is a balancing act and a struggle for Lee, and Affleck portrays that as no one can in the performance of his career. Every expression is measured, and he calculates every word he speaks. His bottled-up emotion is usually well repressed, but you can tell it’s ready to boil over at any point. And it often does as anger. But when you feel prepared to see his genuine sadness, he holds it all back in a way you don’t usually see in a film. You expect the payoff to be Matt Damon crying in Robin Williams’s arms after he says, “It’s not your fault,” like in Good Will Hunting. But you get something far more different and maybe even more profound.

***Spoilers***

The problems with the film are plenty. First of all, there is too much going on. There are way too many characters to keep up with. The scene with Elise and her second husband (Matthew Broderick – Project X, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) was uncomfortable and forced. I know she had to be included because killing her off between Joe’s diagnosis and his death would have made things even more complicated. But she wasn’t needed, and her scene was a downer in the movie and only included to force Lee to see that he was needed even more. Likewise, where was this uncle in Minnesota? Was he even at Joe’s funeral? I understand why he was needed. Because if we hadn’t been led to believe that he was to care for Patrick when Joe died, Lee would have known he would have been the named guardian, and we don’t know if he would have been able to take that. Being named a surprise guardian would force his younger brother to remain in the present and become the man he knows Lee can be. And I don’t understand why Patrick had to have two girlfriends and why they had to have similar names. I got confused about who was who.

Also, we all grieve differently, and there is no way to judge someone’s grief by what we see, but I would have thought we would have seen more from Patrick. Sure, he had his moments where he broke down (like when he was putting items into his refrigerator and imagining his father’s dead, frozen body). But for the most part, at least to me, he seemed to handle things as if it was business as usual. Sure, he was upset about leaving his hometown to live with his uncle in Boston, knowing quite well that Lee could just as easily get the same job in Manchester. Patrick was more worried about where he would live and see his girlfriends than he was about his dead father. Again, we all grieve differently, and who am I to judge? But the way he reacted to everything just felt odd.

The scenes between Lee and Randi could have been some of the best of all time if Lonergan had allowed these two characters enough screen time with one another. If I couldn’t correctly, they had four. If you can get Michelle Williams in your movie, you capitalize on that. Four scenes? Two of which were incredibly short? Come on. Ironically, she might get an Oscar nomination and even win for her scene with Lee near the movie’s end alone. This is the same scene that we’ve seen in the trailers. This scene was great but not as impressive as it could have been. As much as I’d love to see her win an Oscar (she is my favorite actress), this wasn’t enough. And I don’t blame her at all. She and Affleck had all of the chemistry in the world working here. But Lonergan did two things poorly. First, he could have developed Randi better.

We also don’t really know Randi’s relationship with Lee before the tragedy. Sure, we saw they were happy with their family in one scene and that she could rule her house with her fist in another. I would have loved to have seen a scene between Lee and Randi in the months or years after the tragedy. Would it have been too much? Perhaps. I wonder if there will be any deleted scenes when the movie eventually makes its way to home media. But even the pivotal scene could have been better. Williams and Affleck could have brought tears to the entire theater had they wanted to. Williams can do this in every one of her movies if she wants, and we are so engrossed in Affleck’s character that we can completely sympathize with him by this point. This scene was great, but it could have been so much more.

The editing was weak. I wanted a movie with a cohesive flow. But the variety of characters, the flashbacks, and how you couldn’t always tell where you were in the story or how much time had passed from one scene to another left something to be desired. There were also quite a few scenes that didn’t serve a purpose. While this movie was 2 hours and 15 minutes long, it never felt dragging. However, the film felt disjointed at times. I don’t recall seeing a movie of this caliber with so many 15-30-second scenes. Lonergan crafted a brilliant screenplay but didn’t direct this movie to perfection. However, the sum of this film’s impact is more significant than its individual, often choppy scenes.

Plot 9.5/10
Character Development 9.5/10
Character Chemistry 10/10
Acting 10/10
Screenplay 9/10
Directing 8/10
Cinematography 9.5/10
Sound 9.5/10
Hook and Reel 10/10
Universal Relevance 9.5/10
94.5%

A

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