Manchester by the Sea Review

Lonergan writes people who talk past each other, and the whole picture lives in that gap. Lee Chandler discusses his brother's funeral arrangements in the flat register of a man running errands, and the grief underneath surfaces only when a scene ambushes him. The flashback structure carries the argument: Lonergan cuts to the past without a signal, the way memory actually arrives, so the fire and the police station land on us at the same instant they land on Lee.

Casey Affleck plays most of the part with his shoulders and a lowered voice, and the sidewalk encounter with Michelle Williams, two people apologizing across a street while neither sentence ever finishes, is the finest five minutes of American screen acting that year. Jody Lee Lipes shoots a North Shore winter in flat gray and declines to prettify it. What we admire most is the refusal. The film assembles every beat of a healing narrative, the nephew, the boat, the job offer back home, and then has Lee say plainly that he cannot beat it. Only the swelling Albinoni cues push harder than this material ever needed.