Manchester By The Sea

A lonesome, tired young man lives his routine days doing the odd handy jobs around the town his lives in, keeping to himself, getting drunk in bars and picking fights, evoking a boring, introverted and painful life. He is surprised to hear of his brother’s death. But what weighs even more on his shoulders is what is in his brother’s final will; he is charged with looking after his teenage son – a responsibility he isn’t ready to undertake; the reasons for which unfold with the narrative.

This is not a fun film. It is a tough, sincere portrait of grief. Grief will always be a tough matter to portray on screen, and it massively depends not just on the director’s choices but also on the craft of the cast, something which both leads Casey Affleck and Michelle Williams handle with incredible subtlety and an honesty which is immediately identifiable. The grief Affleck’s character churns through is not just for his brother. There is something more in the undercurrent which I won’t reveal here, it is best discovered whilst watching the narrative unfold.

A story of regret, of a struggle with the past which causes the present itself to be an unending struggle, of loss and of trying to handle each day as it comes; this here is a perfect portrait of those internal, quietly emotional aspects of the human condition. How does one consolidate their past stupid mistakes with the requirement to deal with the every day banality that meets us?

Manchester By The Sea offers no solution to those questions, but shares a comforting awareness of those fights.