“Loss seems always to have already happened, a feeling inspired in part by the dual chronology through which the story unfolds, but also because, the film suggests, this is the condition of being a man.”
“They care for each other, but in silent and undemonstrative ways”
“KENNETH LONERGAN’S LATEST FILM Manchester by the Sea — an awards-season favorite and critical darling, a masterpiece according to many — is the story of grown (or almost grown) men who, living in a world where women are absent or otherwise unable to help or understand, suffer the loss of their brothers and their fathers and find ways to go on without them.”
“More than a melodrama about men, Manchester by the Sea stages the melodrama of masculinity.”
“Men count on each other, but they know they are ultimately on their own, and they act accordingly.”
“What if experience doesn’t make us stronger, smarter, or better-equipped, but rather unfits us for the life that follows? Such is the most pronounced meditation of the film, and it indeed manages to move us.”
“Life is suffering shot through with moments of grace, which the film measures in the heavenly chorales of its soundtrack, in quiet unpeopled shots of town and sea, and the piercing humor of men’s banter even in the worst of circumstances.”
“And yet, more powerful than the film’s overt emphasis on loss is its subtler meditation on care — its exploration of the ways Lee will and will not be able to care for Patrick, and for Randi, and for himself.”
“Manchester by the Sea may pass itself off as a story of irrecoverable loss and (more critically) as the story of the losses and pleasures inherent to masculine sociality, but the film also asks us to recognize it as something more specific: not the story of masculinity tout court, but — as the film’s title, setting, and the pronounced Bay State accents of its characters all strongly denote — as a consideration of straight, white, middle-class masculinity in particular.”
“Manchester by the Sea centers on white male guilt: its power and its myopia, its uselessness and its destructiveness. And yet it remains fundamentally unclear to me how much writer and director Kenneth Lonergan knows this about his own film.”
“Men, as they are depicted in the film (white middle-class men, that is), have caused damage, but they can’t figure out how responsible they are for it, and they certainly don’t know how to fix it. Their guilt is real, but it is unspeakable and implacable.”
“That this aggression is rendered as heart-breaking, as a pitiable manifestation of Lee’s longing to feel and to make contact, is an indicator of what is most politically troubling about the film: that it seems to put so much labor — its own and the viewer’s emotional labor, too — into the service of redeeming white male rage, repression, and fragility.”
“Perhaps it seems like a familiar epiphany (or an easy critique) to point out that a mainstream Hollywood film takes white male experience as neutral and universal, unquestioningly representing Lee’s story as the story of loss itself.”
“But this premise has gone so unchallenged in critical responses to Manchester by the Sea that it feels urgent to point it out here.”
“Even if we watch and think generously, giving the film credit for some degree of deliberateness in its representation of white male experience not as neutral but as foregrounded, what exactly does it say about it? What does it get us to see or feel differently?”
“The film ultimately seems to say that for guilt of this kind, there is nothing to be done.”
“Manchester by the Sea is a film in which women say “I’m sorry” and men say nothing.”
“Manchester by the Sea feels like a parody of a Lonergan film, a more palatable and Oscar-friendly version of what he usually does so well.”
“It shares with his previous films, You Can Count On Me (2000) and Margaret (2011), many aspects of what makes them so special: their realism, the appealing ordinariness of their pacing, the uneven length of scenes and their unexpected shock cuts, their humor, their powerful soundscapes, their depictions of the absurd in the tragic, and their hyper-articulate dialogue, at once stylized and so much realer to life than what we’re accustomed to hearing in movies.”
“But somehow the magic and unpredictability of those films is muted here, despite its big emotional pulls.”
“But the flashbacks not only diminish our sense of the unexpected rhythms of Lonergan’s filmmaking, they also place the story too squarely within the mind of Lee Chandler.”
“These memories, we are made to see, belong to him.”
“This structure negates two elements central to the understated beauty and uniqueness of Lonergan’s earlier films: their strong female leads (expertly played by Laura Linney in You Can Count on Me and by Anna Paquin, J. Smith-Cameron, and Jeannie Berlin in Margaret) and their resolute exteriority — instead of trying to enter into characters’ minds, those films showed us just how much we could learn about people strictly from the way they speak and interact with others.”
“Rather than critiquing white male privilege, the film seems merely to highlight the experience of pain it entails — not just painting, but possibly applauding men in all of their stoicism, their mystery, their silent strength.”
“Alicia Christoff is assistant professor of English at Amherst College, where she teaches courses on 19th-century British literature, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and contemporary fiction and creative non-fiction.”
“Given how long the problems of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia that are now bubbling over have been simmering, I can’t feel that a movie about white guilt or about minimal care is enough right now — not enough to sustain us, and not enough to merit so much critical praise.”