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Created Dec 11, 2016 04:55PM PST • Edited Jan 10, 2020 10:24PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   Deaths in the family surround Casey Affleck’s New Englander, dragging him down and knocking him around in Manchester by the Sea. Kenneth Lonergan’s latest fractured-family film has been highly praised at film festivals and has Oscar buzz around it, especially for Affleck’s tortured performance. All this is right and good, even if Manchester by the Sea is not the best of Lonergan’s three family drama pictures.

   That honor remains with You Can Count On Me, his filmmaking debut from 2000. But that’s not to diss his latest, with its characteristic ear for how people muddle through family dynamics in the wake of tragedy.

   Casey Affleck and Kyle Chandler play brothers at the center of that tragedy. A terrible accident reduces Affleck’s convivial guy into a barely functional man, after which an untimely death forces him out of his shell, barely. It’s a terrific performance, but hardly unexpected from the better of the two Affleck actors.

   Lonergan tells the story deftly, with extensive flashbacks throughout the film. He also intersperses notes about the diminished state of traditional guardrails, from the role of religion (“You know we’re Christians also, right?”) to matter-of-fact sex (“Do you want to fuck me?” offers a teen to her new boyfriend). Taken together, Manchester by the Sea is a downbeat classic from the modern master of downbeat Americana.

4. Acting

   Really Great 4.5

   Casey Affleck has become his generation’s finest portrayer of everyman characters beset by tragedy. His reedy voice is a finely tuned instrument for conveying gradations of acceptance and resignation. This was first evident in Gone Baby Gone. Thus his perfectly modulated performance in Manchester by the Sea is clearly Oscar worthy, yet his best performance of 2016 was as the woebegone foreman in The Finest Hours.

   Three superior actors pace him through the terrific ensemble acting in Manchester by the Sea.

   • Michelle Williams is by turns tough, touching and genuinely heartbreaking as his wife.
   • Kyle Chandler is characteristically plucky in a manly sort of way as his older brother.
   • Lucas Hedges is suitably mercurial as a teenage son cast adrift by family tragedy.

   The supporting cast is almost equally strong.

   • Kara Hayward jumps offscreen as a high school girlfriend with controlling instincts.
   • Tate Donovan always jumps offscreen, here in a bit part as tough-love Hockey Coach.
   • Gretchen Mol impresses as an emotionally unstable mother clinging to sobriety.
   • Matthew Broderick lends his star power as her stable husband.
   • C.J. Wilson is plaintive as a regular guy.
   • Kenneth Lonergan cameos in his own movie as a passerby with unbidden parenting advice.
   • Anna Baryshnikov is in there somewhere. Yes, she’s Mikhail’s daughter.
   • Mary Mallen jumps offscreen as a single mom who’d like some male attention.

5. Male Stars Really Great 4.5

6. Female Stars Really Great 4.5

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Kenneth Lonergan combines a deft storyteller’s touch with keen insight into how normal people interact in families. He also specializes in a strong sense of place: Boston and the coastal towns just north of it in Manchester by the Sea. His films always set the drama in motion through a family tragedy, even if it was decades earlier, as in You Can Count On Me, or adjacent to the family, as in Margaret.

    Finally, he also specializes in long movies, with Manchester by the Sea clocking in at 2¼ hours. Thus he’ll never be a commercial success, but certainly is an artistic one.

11. Direction Great 4.0

12. Play Great 4.0

13. Music Great 4.0

14. Visuals Great 4.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 2.4

17. Sex Titillating 1.6

18. Violence Brutal 3.0

19. Rudeness Profane 2.6

21. Reality

    Glib 1.2

22. Circumstantial Glib 1.5

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0