The language of grief
> Director Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea hones in on the numbing realities of loss
PERHAPS there’s a carelessness in reducing a work so diligently layered as Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea to a form so simplistic as “a crying Casey Affleck tells people he’s fine, for two hours” but there’s something brutally apt about the descriptor.
Manchester marks the great lament to the agonies of bottled emotion, reaching its critical mass in a scene in which Affleck’s Lee Chandler is confronted by his ex-wife (Michelle Williams), who begs him to talk to her, just to open the channel of communication.
He tells her that he’s fine. That he doesn’t want to talk about it. Repeatedly, over and over again, even though the words become choked and muted by his own tears.
Grief isn’t always a flurry of passion: tears, broken vases, and most importantly – Hollywood’s beautiful, flowing speech, spilling out of tongues that already have such deep, intuitive understanding of every fluctuation of loss.
But isn’t grief also the burden of silence?
Slow and aching, sometimes it’s the veil of fatigue that descends like a thick fog and makes it near impossible to see the world beyond one’s self.
It’s evident even in Manchester’s opening scene: Lee is a handyman in a Boston apartment complex, he enters strangers’ lives in the guise of a voyeur.
With a nod, he traipses into their bathrooms and cranks things into place. He shares only physical space with them, nothing more.
It’s a practice he has settled comfortably into now.
Though Manchester opens on the death of Lee’s brother (Kyle Chandler), this isn’t the first major loss he’s suffered in his time. Not the first wounding, but the re-opening of an old scar.
Lonergan carefully layers in Lee’s flashbacks to his past trauma, flitting back and forth between past and present, as a reminder that those memories have made their presence permanently felt.
Key, too, is Affleck’s searing portrayal of the role, for which he won a Golden Globe.
Manchester’s outlook may be pessimistic, but there’s truth in the sense that we carry our grief like old scars; weighted burdens that mark us, that forever threaten to be violently torn open again. Yet, still we persist.
It’s in Manchester’s quietest moments that its greatest impact can be felt, like when Lee opens up the refrigerator door and realises there’s no food left in the house.
The world can feel like its ending, but someone still needs to do the shopping.
That strange process, however, can feel unfathomable to some, particularly those young enough not to have been fully initiated into the strange banality of adulthood.
Lee’s nephew Patrick (Lucas Hedges) wants no part of it, certainly; to him, his path to functionality is through distraction, by almost pretending the death of his father never happened.
Instead, he indulges himself fully in his circle of friends and the careful trickery of maintaining relationships with two girls at once.
Death is final, so there shouldn’t be anything further to experience after the initial loss.
Yet, Patrick slowly becomes overwhelmed by these creeping feelings of discomfort upon hearing that his father can’t be buried until spring when the ground has thawed, meaning the body will be kept refrigerated in the morgue until then.
Lee and Patrick, now placed under Lee’s guardianship, find their paths of grieving increasingly divergent; nor do they have the capability of expression to bridge that gulf between them.
As men, their silent mourning exists in a culture which actively seeks to suppress their emotions. This only further cuts the ties of communication between them.
If there is a societyaccepted language to be spoken man-to-man, it’s that of violence.
The fact that rage has become the more acceptable vocabulary for wounded men is perhaps one of the great tragedies at the core of Manchester’s suppressed emotions.
Lee and Patrick repeatedly snap at each other from across their great divide like frothing hounds, arguing over who’s going to take care of the latter’s recently-inherited boat.
All, while that silent language of grief hangs above them, unspoken underneath the forces of easier emotions.
If only they could just speak those simple words: “Yes. I miss him, too.” – The Independent