MOVIE REVIEW – Lee Chandler is the main protagonist of Manchester by the Sea, captured to perfection by Casey Affleck with the accent of old New England in his voice and the hunch of a lightweight boxer in his stance. As a Boston janitor, he is portrayed as resolute, taciturn and sometimes combative – typically one of those people whose unhappy personality keeps others at bay.

In “Manchester by the Sea,” death in the family forces a lonely man to let the world back into his life — at least for a while. Lee (Casey Affleck) has a job of a handyman in Boston, shoveling snow from walkways, fixing leaks, unclogging people’s toilets. He’s quiet, chiefly polite and keeps to himself inside his dingy basement apartment. When several women flirt with him, he doesn’t respond; you can almost see him recoil from having to interact with another human being outside of work.

“I am just doing my job, just leave me alone”

Casey Affleck’s exceptional, intuitive performance as the story’s lead character, Lee Chandler, is the key to the film’s excellence. While all the film’s key actors deliver outstanding performances (one of the ingredients that make Manchester so sublime), still Affleck here has the role of his lifetime.

For the most part, Lee manages to keep his internal upset in check with hard work and solitude, but his emotional trauma surfaces beneath his outwardly placid surface, coloring the care he invests in words and actions and sometimes erupting into senseless bar-fighting or a fist through a windowpane.

He also fails to humor the vexed residents related to his job and rejects easy sexual come-ons. It’s a maintenance existence in every sense of the word. Then he receives a phone call that disrupts everything.

In fact, he’s called back to his hometown after the sudden death of his brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler). When he is back, he’s told by the family’s lawyer that he’s now the legal guardian of his brother’s teenage son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges). This is a major problem for Lee, since he made every effort to remove himself from society. He doesn’t have any friends any loved ones anymore and he doesn’t want them either. He only has a torturous past that he hangs on his shoulders. Why? Well, it’s the “why” that makes this story so compelling, and so pummeling. In fact, the “why” is the story itself, and Lonergan is wise to slowly unravel it bit by bit.

More “Stranger” than the hero of Albert Camus

What could have turned Lee into such an inexpressive, detached loner? The answer, which is revealed halfway through the movie in a magnificent bit of filmmaking, is more dreadful than anything you might imagine: It’s unthinkable. But the director is less interested in tragedy itself than the way in how we cope with it. Some people figure out a way to mourn, forgive (themselves) and move on, and learn how to bear the extra weight of a heavy heart, while others never recover.

Besides Affleck’s Oscar-worthy acting, Hedges is equally good as the teenage Patrick, who is dealing with two girlfriends and takes pleasure in nagging his uncle and who also has a delayed reaction to the loss of his father (the death was not entirely unexpected since Joe suffered from congenital heart failure).

There is one scene, where Patrick pesters Lee about having to wait until spring to give his Dad a proper burial, because the ground is frozen solid in winter. Lonergan lets the conversation veer from humorous to poignant to funny again. You watch the sequence enraptured, because it reminds you of how real life never plays out in one single, neat, sustained tone, and how many movies do you see these days that bear even a passing resemblance to reality?

No Escape

In other parts of the movie, “Manchester by the Sea” makes you hard to catch your breath at the enormity of the emotions these characters are feeling — Williams has at least two tremendous moments— but Lonergan never resorts to manipulation or contrivance.

“Manchester by the Sea” is the latest installment in a body of work from an artist fascinated by how life marches on, with or without us, and how we scramble to keep up. Not everyone can, though. Some wounds, even time can’t heal.

-BadSector-