There’s been so much talk about the troubles of the white working class in America that Kenneth Lonergan’s new film Manchester By the Sea comes at just the right time. Whether it’s the right film is something else. In spite of people’s good intentions, it can be hard for filmmakers who have access to tens of millions of dollars for a project like this one to avoid condescension. Filmmakers who operate at that level usually can’t help imposing on an entire class of people the curse of a well-meaning outsider’s view of their lives.
The town of Manchester By the Sea sits on the coast a bit north of Boston. The film opens on a picturesque harbor dotted by small sailboats gently bobbing with the soft undulations of the water. The town features postcard-classic New England clapboard homes and churches with steeples. Outside the harbor, Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) teases his nephew Patrick about sharks as they enjoy an outing on Patrick’s father’s small commercial fishing boat. But there’s something glum about Lee that makes you know that bad news is surely on its way.
For the Chandler family, the placid harbor and the sailboats are not even a fantasy – that’s not their world. Lee is a janitor in Quincy, closer to Boston. He’s divorced; he drinks in bars and starts fights. The idyll on the boat is Lee’s memory. In his present, a few years later, nephew Patrick will be playing hockey – and starting fights just like his uncle. But the big event is that Kyle Chandler, Lee’s brother and Patrick’s father, will drop dead when Patrick is in high school – and although he never mentioned it, brother Joe named Lee as the son’s guardian. And maybe the one bit of clarity Lee has is that he’s not the guy for this job.
The story is probably touching enough. When Lee was married, something terrible happened and it was his fault. He lives in an obviously imperfect world of imperfect beings, but this was worse, and Lee suffers. It’s what’s brought that morose look to his face and the depressed posture to the rest of him. But there’s no relief from it, and scenes of Lee as a rowdy young husband raising hell with his pals doesn’t separate well enough pre-trauma Lee and Lee after the dreadful moment. He’s a one-note character.
He’s also too much like other working class white guys in the movies. They all drink too much and get in fights, have jobs that rob them of their spirit, and go through painful divorces from which they can’t recover. And just deep enough inside them, their movies uncover their great talent and nobility.
Well, working class people are pretty much like everyone else. Some are lovely; some are stinkers; most are somewhere in between. Like most other people, most working class men are not alcoholics; they don’t go looking for fights; they love their children; they read books, watch TV, go to the park, have adventures – and on and on. In spite of the continuing press accounts, working class people are no more or less stereotypic than the rest of humanity. And it seems unfair and uninteresting – and more than that, ignorant – to paint them otherwise.
The ever-repeating shots of that picturesque harbor don’t help. Director Kenneth Lonergan goes to those sights after just about every event in the film, for murky reasons and dreary results. When the sky gets darker and the waves in the harbor rougher after an emotional scene on land, it’s time to tear up the postcards.
Manchester By the Sea may be a better movie than I’ve painted it, but some of the reactions to the film sound like apologies for election coverage that missed the dismay infecting working class people in this country and others. But the movie itself honors a cliché, and not the integrity of a human being’s struggle.
