Adversity’s chronicler
Kenneth Lonergan makes deadly serious films, but he still finds room for hope
NEW YORK — “I should tell the people in L.A. that I’m here,” director Kenneth Lonergan said, referring to the publicists who arranged for him to meet a reporter in front of a downtown Manhattan restaurant on a recent Sunday morning. “Because I’m usually late, and I think they’d feel better to hear it.”
The comment was uttered with what might be called Lonergrithm — a sincerity laced with amused ennui, as if to say, “I want to do right by the studio, but I think this whole machine is a bit nonsensical.”
Such are the contradictions of the director, whose new movie, “Manchester By the Sea,” arrives Nov. 18. Lonergan is a wry wit who makes movies about the deadly serious, an important film figure who has nonetheless been absent from the scene for long stretches.
At 54, the filmmaker has helmed just three movies, splitting his time with his other job as a playwright. Yet on his résumé is one of the most inf luential dramas of the 2000s (“You Can Count On Me”), one of the most troubled productions in cinema history (“Margaret”), and now one of the most heralded pictures of the year. Since Sundance, “Manchester” has been wowing tastemakers with its plunge into grief and guilt (and a little redemption).
Told with the help of intermittent (and powerful) flashbacks, the movie follows Lee (Casey Affleck), a Boston janitor living in a state of angry isolation after he played a part in a family tragedy. Lee’s life is far from happy, but it does have a kind of self-protective smallness. Then a new, intimately seismic event forces him to return to the coastal town of Manchester, Mass., and into a coexistence with his teenage nephew.
Lonergan shaped the coastal New England story from the point of view of a vigilant parent — he and his wife are raising a teenage daughter in New York’s West Village — and despite the change in venue, brought to it the same elemental fears.
“I’ve always been interested in the idea of ‘how do people go on when everything seems hopeless?’ ” Lonergan said, using that last word often and as a kind of parallax; competing views on hopelessness is the animating force of all his movies. “I mean, hope doesn’t always trump over adversity. A lot of the time adversity wins. But even when it does, people are still here. What do they do with that?”
How a man like Lonergan has come to be a chronicler of separation and loss is a mystery even to him. The director suffered no great childhood trauma growing up in relative privilege on New York’s Upper West Side. His parents did get divorced when he was young, he did watch a grandmother suffer from dementia, and he alludes to losing a friend at 40. But he mostly describes a supportive environment. Which may explain his preoccupation. “I have no real religious beliefs; I don’t even have a philosophical belief that I find helpful in times of trouble,” he said. “When people I love die there’s no ameliorating way of looking at it. So for me it all comes down to the idea of people taking care of each other.”
The director’s low-key exterior hides a mischievous sense of humor. On stage at the New York Film Festival he began to introduce the “Manchester” cast with awkward politeness — “It’s in no particular order” — then turned the tables with, “It’s kind of in the order I like you.”
He similarly introduced “Manchester” financier and producer Kimberly Steward: “Every person I’ve ever worked for has guaranteed me creative control,” he said. “She actually provided it.”
Steward, who is African American, is notable in her own right. If “Manchester” gets nominated for best picture, she would become only the second black woman ever to earn the honor. (Oprah Winfrey was the first.) It’s ironic given that “Manchester” has, in this season of diversity, become a touchstone of sorts for what the website Vox called the “sad white person” movie.
Lonergan says that the article didn’t bother him but is troubled by a suggestion that filmmakers should stay away from any race. “The answer to the under-indexing of black movies is to make more movies with black people, not to make fewer movies about white people,” he said. “There should be more movies about everyone.”
He added that, though his movies do in fact tend to contain a lot of sad white people, he doesn’t see the issue in race terms. Human struggle, after all, is universal.
“The world can be cruel. Many human aspirations are not fulfilled and terrible things happen,” he said. “But it’s in the context of a gorgeous planet. Take a look around,” he said, gesturing to a New York street corner. “The people, the life, even the pigeons flapping around; they’re interesting.”
He caught himself. “I don’t mean to sound like a pothead,” he said with a laugh. “Sometimes I feel bleak about myself or what’s going on in my world. But then I look at people helping each other every day, even in difficult places like hospitals or wars. I suppose I do have a melancholic personality to some degree. But it’s not bleak, and it’s not hopeless. Things are only hopeless when you’re dead.”