How we Navigate Troubled Waters: Manchester by the Sea (2016)
It’s 2:34 A.M. Your college house is quiet for the first time in hours, and you can hear nothing–no music, no doors opening or closing, and certainly no screaming cutting across the halls. Instead, you hear the whoosh of your exhales, the thump of your thumb across your phone screen as you scroll, and the TikTok sound that changes at your command. You’ve encountered a video, something along the lines of “Top 5 saddest films that had me f’d up.” You have the attention span of the average teenager in 2026 at this hour of the day, so you pause the video’s annoying sound and scour the comments for the list. Dead Poets Society (1989)is already on your list, but you notice Manchester by the Sea (2016) and Google its review. It sounds interesting enough, so weeks later, you spin a wheel on wheeldecide.com, and that’s what it selects. You go in expecting a straightforward tragedy, but as the film continues, the waves of the story get deeper and start to unfold.
The film, directed by Kenneth Lonergan (You Can Count On Me [2000], Margaret [2011]), stars Casey Affleck as Lee Chandler, who is forced to confront his past that still resides in the little coastal Massachusetts town of Manchester-by-the-Sea. Michelle Williams, Matthew Broderick, Kyle Chandler, Gretchen Mol, and Lucas Hedges, a star-studded cast, are stripped of their Hollywood status and placed into what we normal people call a normal life. Affleck is no longer an Academy Award winner or the brother of Batman. He’s Lee Chandler, a janitor, or sometimes a handyman, whose day seems to be an amalgamation of our everyday problems: the wobbly light in our dining room, the faulty electrical system, the clogged toilet, and many more miscellaneous tasks. And throughout the movie, he remains the same simple guy. Lee doesn’t want to share a drink, or sleep with a client who keeps giving him the eyes, or stay after for dinner. Instead, he’s ready to disappear back into his anonymity in Quincy, MA. However, through flashbacks, the movie treats us to a different, unfamiliar Lee. The somber, distanced individual transforms into a jolly man who loves a drink in his basement with friends or to playfully kiss his sick wife, who begs him to stay away. He has all the things we strive for in our adult lives: the realistic, beautiful aspects. “Tragedy” seems like a word that could never be associated with the Lee of these flashbacks, and the TikTok that brought me here initially left me feeling displaced. But then the midpoint of the movie strikes, and you realize how an accidental tragedy has brought Lee to where he is, taking his love away from him, and you’re in the troubled waters right with him.
Without its technical elements, Manchester by the Sea would lose all its depth and meaning. This is not an A24, where the choice of lighting or the shot composition means something dramatic or crucial. Instead, you’re watching a film filled with shots that are simply boring. The camera is almost always a medium shot, there are little to no pans, and almost every transition is a cut. But Kenneth Lonergan, as a director, isn’t trying to wow you with his choices. He leaves that to the scriptwriters. Instead, he’s trying to demonstrate the simplicity with which such tragedy can coexist with the viewer. The dramas exist within our everyday lives, and he lets the story consume our viewing experience, not highly stylized formal elements. These shots are raw, realistic, and make you uncomfortable in the best way imaginable. In nostalgic moments, you’re presented with beautiful ballads that incorporate various string instruments. But in the film’s “present,” we’re all just like Lee, left with nothing but the diegetic sound that we can’t avoid. It’s the moments where your phone is vibrating in the funeral home, or the awkward silence between you and your uncle, that make life what it is. We’re all going through the motions without a soundtrack or a crossfade to tell us how to feel, which is what Lonergan seems to be trying to get at in his work.
One way Lonergan accomplishes this is through his selection of cast members for such demanding roles. Lonergan took over as director from Matt Damon, who had scheduling conflicts due to the soon-to-be hit movie, The Martian (2015), and who thus had to drop his role as both director and leading actor. However, even with such a sudden assignment, Lonergan’s design does the story justice. With 128 award wins, the cast excelled at something that tends not to please a crowd: authenticity. Affleck wasn’t being asked to build himself up into an aggressive private investigator, as in Gone Baby Gone (2007). He’s instead playing his more well-tempered self, or perhaps even more mellow and toned down. Williams is no longer a film icon, but a woman who must deal with the challenges of motherhood from an unimaginable perspective, as the film later explains. The performances of every actor slap you in the face with a normalcy that is honestly quite uncanny. No one seems to be building themselves up or breaking themselves down. Instead, they’re all stripped of any pride they possess, on a quest where not our lives, but ourselves are constantly changing.
The film’s emphasis on the storyline and distance from dramatized formal elements is something that I can appreciate, even as a dedicated consumer of heavily produced, stylized film and television. It helps us realize that we can’t run to where we find comfort (like technical aspects) to try to avoid the feelings that the film evokes, which I find interesting and commendable. We’re placed in a small town, leaving no space for all the grandeur of life, but instead, pointing out that the grandeur, however muted, is life. Of course, there’s power in formal elements, and choosing to pan the camera rather than use cuts between shots might have given us more to interpret as viewers. Additionally, it’s easy to disdain all the quiet moments where a song could have been inserted to elevate the immersive experience. At times, the film’s pacing is also extremely slow, which might lose viewers who don’t have the patience to endure the story’s course.
The film is nowhere near perfect, but in that case, it seems like Lonergan has accomplished his task. He wants us not just to “get over” the themes of grief and pain that he’s exploring, as he has said in an exclusive interview with Creative Screenwriting. He wants us to grapple with the raw, unfiltered themes of everyday human mistakes.
Smooth sailing isn’t guaranteed by any means as we navigate the waters of life. But what we can guarantee each other as humans, which Lonergan is trying to get at, is forgiveness and grace, not just to each other, but also ourselves. We are all bound to have our Lee Chandler moments. Yet, we have to allow ourselves to evolve, change, and find meaning in our new realities that continue to reveal themselves, strengthening the endurance of our human spirit.
Now, take a deep breath, grab hold of the wheel, and prepare to navigate the waves of our inescapable, troubled waters.
