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Saturday 22 October 2016

Best of the London Film Festival 2016: Manchester By The Sea

If La La Land was the best possible way to start a Saturday, Manchester By The Sea was a surprisingly life-affirming start to a Sunday. How a two-and-a-quarter-hour movie about death and grief can be so full of life and so damn naturally funny is hard to fathom.

I was expecting 135 minutes of tortured dissection of emotional trauma and to an extent that’s what I got, but I got so much more.

Casey Affleck delivers not only his best performance since Gone Baby Gone but also quite possibly his career-best. From the opening scenes, it’s all too clear that his Lee Chandler is a broken man, carrying insurmountable and self-destructive guilt over an unknown trauma. Required to return to his eponymous hometown for the first time in many years due to the death of his brother, the cause of Lee’s guilt and grief is gradually revealed in timely flashbacks. The revelation of what happened has a half-life for Lee, his family, the town and the audience.

Where’s the humour then? In Lee’s bickering but loving relationship with his nephew, played by an almost equally outstanding Lucas Hedges. There’s an Odd Couple-esque chemistry to this pair, the reluctant parent and the reluctant child on the verge of being his own man.

The script and direction by Kenneth Lonergan are outstanding and will be rewarded with awards noms left right and centre, as will Caffleck. Given the nature and detail of the narrative, the film could have been unwatchably grim, but Lonergan finds a lightness of touch that allows the film to breathe.

Also awards-worthy is Michelle Williams as Lee’s ex-wife, mostly seen in flashback, but her key scene in the present with Caffleck is best described by Screen’s Jeremy Kay as “devastating in capital letters”. Arguably it is both the most upsetting and the most uplifting scene in this simply outstanding film that may well find its way on to my Desert Island Flicks list.
Score: 10/10

UK release date: 13 January 2017

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