MAKING WAVES: Williams and Affleck are flintily affecting as Randi and Lee, the young parents at the center of Manchester by the Sea.
ROADSIDE ATTRACTIONS
THE WRITER-DIRECTOR Kenneth Lonergan listens to his characters with the gentle forbearance of a Catholic priest receiving confession from his more error-prone parishioners—unshocked, even quietly amused, by what he hears; generous with the absolutions. In his third film, Manchester by the Sea, Lonergan is listening to Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck), a taciturn janitor who lives alone in a basement in Boston and spends his days scrubbing toilets, shoveling snow, and doing odd handyman jobs. Hands jammed into his pockets, Lee seems a million miles away, eyes hazing over in conversations, small talk or flirtation striking him like a fly on a windscreen. You can practically feel the dead air around him. When he drinks, alone in a bar, he drinks to oblivion, and when someone looks at him the wrong way, he picks a fight almost like a kid rolling his eyes at his teacher, accepting the battering as his daily due—the tax on his existence.
What is with this guy? What happened to Lee? We don’t find out until about an hour into the film, after Lee is summoned back to his hometown of Manchester, a small fishing community on Boston’s north shore, by the news that his older brother, Joe (Kyle Chandler), has died. Moreover, Lee has been given custody of Joe’s brittle, pithy-tongued teenage son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges). Patrick’s mother is an alcoholic—out of the picture. Meanwhile, there are funeral arrangements to be made, pizzas to be microwaved and two girlfriends to be shuffled. “Am I supposed to tell you to use a condom?” Lee asks Patrick; he’s a wholly reluctant stepparent.