Manchester by the Sea is the kind of film that lingers in your bones long it’s over. It’s a slow-burning masterpiece of raw and unfiltered grief. A type of grief that is isolating and that doesn’t heal.
Casey Affleck‘s portrayal of Lee Chandler is the kind of performance that is subtle, reserved, almost too real. He plays a man whose entire existence has been flattened by loss, walking through life as if he’s already dead inside. There is cathartic redemption here, no moment where he “learns to move on”. To me, what makes this movie so gut-wrenching is that it doesn’t lie about the nature of loss.
At a certain point in the film, we are exposed to an ordinary day for everyone except for the man whose life had just disintegrated. It starts quietly, by Lee recounting the horror of accidentally causing the fire that killed his children. His face barely changes, his voice quiet as he tells the story. You can feel it — a man shattered into a million pieces. And then, without any melodrama, followed only by the buildup of intense music, he reaches for an officer’s gun. It all happens naturally: no hesitation, no checking the room.
That instant is one of the most shocking scenes ever. Not because it’s bloody or grotesque, but because how he is determinate in that second when, without second thoughts or a grand declaration of pain. The gun doesn’t go off and the scene ends as quietly as it began. It could just be that, because it isn’t treated like a big event, it’s one of the heaviest scenes out there. Life simply went on.
In Manchester by the Sea there is no moving on, no picking up the pieces, no hopeful final act. Just grief as a life sentence.
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