“You don’t understand. There’s nothin’ there,” says a handyman named Lee to the woman in his life in the quietly devastating drama “Manchester by the Sea.” We know there’s something there, however: We’ve seen the way he handles the pictures of his loved ones.
There’s something dammed up and scraped out inside Lee, and as played by Casey Affleck in a contained yet crushing performance, the character embodies the debilitation of sorrow. Affleck eschews all the actors’ clichés — burning intensity, sou🎀🅘lful suffering, haunted brooding. It’s a magnificently interior performance, the sort of acting that doesn’t call attention to itself but draws us in to peer closer.
Lee, who makes his living unclogging pipes and taking away rubbish at a cluster of Boston apartment buildings, learns only after the death of his brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) that he is the designated guardian for Joe’s son, Patrick (Lucas Hedges), a smart-mouthed high school student with two girl✱friends and a place on the hockey team in the town of the title, an hour or so from Lee’s place. In writer-director Kenneth Lonergan’s beautiful, aching screenplay, accompanied by textured direction, it gradually emerges that Lee and Joe’s happiest days were spent on a fishing boat, joking around with each other and teasing Patrick, then just a little boy, about the sharks that were sure to eat him.
Those scenes aren’t the only ones that lend the film some unexpected humor: Lonergan lets the story of this troubled family unfol🐬d in ways that suggest the compromises and discordance of life rather than the screenwriterly imperative to give everyone an “arc.” Lee isn’t much different at the end than he is at the beginning. As his sweetheart Randi, Michelle Williams takes a more conventionally developed movie character and plays her with so much empathy that it’s impossible not to marvel at her performance, especially in a wrenching late scene that defines the pair’s relationship, but doesn’t resolve anything.
That sense of resistance to what’s expected is strong in both Affleck and Lonergan, and “Manchester” is a better movie for it. The film is tied up in the character of a people notoriously called reserved or “flinty” — my people, as a matter of fact, Massachusetts folk. Production designer Ruth De Jong has created an impeccable, indeed dizzying, simulation of the backdrop of my youth, all creaky old houses, battered walnut hutches, sad wallpaper. All of this is in danger of looking “charming” to outsiders. I’d say the proper term is “dismal.” If working-class New Englanders are mistrustful or frosty, they’re only products of this environment and its cruel, endless winters that can kill people — and often do — then laugh at the corpses: Joe can’t be buried till the spring because the ground is frozen.
Begin with a type and you ✃create nothing, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote; begin with an individual and you create a type. Its feet planted in a peculiar place, its sensibility in harmony with that of a man who rejects any attempt at healing or even self-examination, “Manchester by the Sea” is precise in its vision, universal in its application. It’s one of this year’s few great films.