Manchester By The Sea (2016)
Manchester by the Sea provides a glimpse into the life of a man who is defined by tragedy. It was interesting watching this after Arrival because both films use editing to weave the tragic backstory of their protagonists throughout the film to provide context for their motivations. But what sets this film apart is how the tragedy is not simply a set up for a narratively convenient catharsis.
When the film opens, we are introduced to a happy Lee Chandler horsing around with his nephew Patrick on a fishing boat. There’s no context for this scene other than to give us a glimpse into a time when both characters were much happier. We then see an older Lee toiling away as a superintendent in Boston. Far from the happy man we are introduced to, the Lee we see now is morose and has very little patience for others. We see him find an excuse to get into a fight with two random men at a bar, painting a picture of an emotionally distant and broken man.
When Lee’s brother dies and he is forced to return to Manchester to deal with the arrangements, the gap between the man we are first introduced to and the man we see in Boston is slowly filled in as we discover the circumstances that gave birth to the emotionally distant man that we see in the film’s present. As Lee struggles to connect with a much older Patrick, carefully edited flashbacks reveal that Lee inadvertently caused the death of his three children.
It’s here that we might expect both Patrick and Lee to find some way to connect with each other through their grief. A young man suddenly in need of a father figure and an older man who lost his children — it’s so convenient that one can’t help but think of the story as a plot device to bring the characters together. But the reason why the film is so critically acclaimed is that it’s not that simple. This film isn’t Usagi Drop or a Nick Hornby adaptation where the characters find happiness by coming together to form a new, non-nuclear family.
Instead, Manchester by the Sea eschews sentimentality and melodrama by providing a brief glimpse into the reality of living with grief. We learn that Lee fled Manchester as part of his penance, trying to escape the haunting memory of his part in his children’s death behind. His ex-wife has remarried and has another child, and seeing his wife move on triggers a breakdown that leads him to realize that he’ll never be able to move on from his past. Patrick seems to cope with the death of his father as well as one might expect, and the film shows us his awkward attempts to have sex with his girlfriend or playing guitar in his band. You’d almost think he was a character taken out of Sing Street. The glossy veneer of the teenage angst is worn off when he makes an attempt to reconnect with his estranged mother which ends in disaster, and he finally reaches his breaking point when he realizes that his father will be kept frozen for several months because they can’t dig the grave in the winter. Through Lee and Patrick, we get an encapsulation of the five stages of grief — Patrick in denial and Lee somewhere in between depression and acceptance.
In the case of both characters, grief is something that lingers throughout the time we spend with them. There isn’t a cathartic moment where the characters “cry it out” and cope with their grief in the one or two months that we spend with them. The film wants us to believe in the premise that somehow Lee will get a chance to be a father to Patrick when it is revealed that Lee’s brother designated Lee as Patrick’s guardian in the event of his death. But when we see that Lee can’t cope with living in Manchester, even after a decade away, the film ends with Patrick being adopted by a family friend instead. The closest we get to a cathartic moment is Lee telling Patrick that he’s renting out a two bedroom apartment in the hope that Patrick might visit him in the future. It doesn’t try to dole out the narrative closure that we would expect from a film about grief, because it presents grief as a process and not as a problem to be solved. Lee’s brother might have hoped that forcing Lee to step up and be Patrick’s guardian might have helped him move past the trauma of causing the death of his children, but it’s clearly not that simple.
Manchester by the Sea is successful because it is a film that doesn’t offer any real solutions. We are voyeurs peering into the lives of two characters in order to better understand how grief might strike us. It doesn’t patronize us by painting a rosy picture of life after grief, but asks us to think about how grief can affect us. Surely most of us would continue to live our lives, but having someone tell you that tomorrow will be better doesn’t change the fact that it is terrible today.
