Manchester by the Sea
Source: Amazon MGM Studios
Years after its 2016 release, I had yet to pluck up the courage to watch Manchester by the Sea. I was peripherally aware of the film’s release, reception, and awards campaign. On Oscar night, Ben Affleck’s brother Casey had picked up Best Actor for his lead role in Manchester, with Kenneth Lonnergan winning the award for Best Screenplay - both awards being somewhat overshadowed in the moment by the Moonlight/La La Land Best Picture mix-up that ended the evening. Buzz surrounding the film was rapturous, placing it squarely on my watchlist. Yet I could never quite pluck up the courage to pull it up and press play. It was the commentary surrounding the praise that gave me pause.
“a study in individual misery” (New York Times)
A film about the “painful and irreparable wrongness of life.” (The Guardian)
“Unrelenting in its bleakness” (Vulture)
“a shattering yet graceful elegy of loss and grief.” (Empire)
The messaging was unanimous – this film was soul-crushing. In fact, these mainstream reviews were fairly measured relative to the broader chatter on the interwebs. Viewers were commonly tossing around extreme superlatives such as “the single most depressing movie ever made.” More deterred than allured by these testimonials, I kept Manchester on the backburner for years.
Well, one evening in 2022, the film broke free of its purgatory. At home alone, suddenly mustering the emotional fortitude to take it on, I turned on Manchester by the Sea.
I’ll begin by saying that, unsurprisingly, every warning about the film was warranted. Manchester was devastating, soul-crushing, brutal, bleak, deeply sad - whatever increasingly extreme adjective you can find. But it was also brilliant. This was not “misery-porn,” simply wallowing in tragedy and torment. It instead used tragedy as a backdrop in a story that gently but boldly reckoned with real questions of grief, guilt, reconciliation, and healing. Writer/director Kenneth Lonnergan crafted characters and dialogue with a natural realism, complimented with a dry humor elegantly sprinkled throughout that offered an emotional lifeline in the bleakness. At the center of it all is a protagonist, portrayed brilliantly by Casey Affleck, that is so tragic, broken, and well-realized that his plight cannot help but haunt you well after the credits roll.
My reaction as the film drew to a close, aside from a general emotional exhaustion, was an eagerness to dive deeper into the themes that the film so thoughtfully explored, but through the lens of Scripture. As Christians, how should the gospel shape our perspective of this story, and of the extreme human struggles depicted within? The richness of this story and its characters demanded such an assessment.
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Manchester by the Sea follows Boston handyman Lee Chandler (Affleck), a mysteriously withdrawn and passionless shell of a human being, plodding from day to day in relative isolation. We see in a series of scattered flashbacks the chilling origins of his emotional disconnect – his horrifying mistake that results in the death of all 3 of his children in a house fire and the subsequent end of his marriage. Lee’s despair and self-loathing is overpowering, only entrenched by his discovery that he would suffer no legal consequences for his mistake. His subsequent suicide attempt leaves little doubt as to the depths of the guilt in which he finds himself.
From the point of the tragedy onwards, Lee is living an undeserved life as far as he’s concerned. Not only has he abandoned any pursuit of fulfillment and happiness, but even the mundane pleasures of daily life are too good for him. His brother Joe (Kyle Chandler) needs to force him to even furnish his basement apartment - to Lee, even an armchair and a lamp is more than he deserves. Lee cuts himself off from any voluntary human relationship. He lives alone in a new city, far from the family and friends of his previous life. His interactions with his clients are cold, detached, and prickly. A woman casually flirting with him at a bar is met with nothing but absent disinterest.
This detached existence is disrupted when circumstances thrust Lee into re-kindling his relationship with his teenage nephew, Patrick (Lucas Hedges). Lee’s brother Joe has passed away and Lee is stunned to learn that Joe had assigned him as Patrick’s legal guardian. As he sorts through his brother’s affairs and Patrick’s future, Lee is forced into an extended return to the town of Manchester-by-the-Sea: ground zero for all of Lee’s trauma from which he has fled. He is forced to revisit his most painful memories and also grapple with this new call to take responsibility for another child – an undertaking that he finds unthinkable in the wake of his previous failings as a parent.
Lee’s detached self-loathing is brought to a punishing crescendo when he happens to cross paths with his ex-wife Randi (Michelle Williams) who is re-married with a child, having found strength to start a new life. Lee is offered a lifeline toward some form of healing as Randi expresses regret for admonishing him so cruelly in aftermath of the tragedy. She earnestly tries to connect with him, offering some reconciliation, and Lee will have none of it. Randi is distraught by his inability to engage. “You can’t just die…!” she exclaims tearfully. She sees the path on which Lee seems to be locked – an existence of numbed misery until his life finally flickers out. Lee softly but stubbornly dismisses her. Ultimately, he can only walk away.
We might crave a resolution where the circumstantial reconnection between Lee and Patrick paves the way for a bond of mutual healing in their respective states of grief, pulling Lee out of his emotional purgatory and helping Patrick process the loss of his father. The film offers us no such satisfaction. As the film draws to a close, Lee reveals that he has decided to forfeit guardianship of his nephew, instead making arrangements for Patrick to be adopted by a close family friend. The lack of a clean resolution to the story is a statement in itself – the film posits that there is no simple fix for Lee’s turmoil. The timeline of such things doesn’t conform to comfortable story conventions. The film very pointedly leaves open-ended the question of if Lee will ever truly heal.
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As I reflected on the intersections between Scripture and Manchester’s themes, I strove to maintain a healthy respect for the gravity and complexity of impossibly terrible situations like Lee’s. We should avoid any temptation to trivialize such things by resorting to broad simple platitudes, even if there is truth to them. “God provides comfort and healing in tragedy” is a sentiment that Christians en masse would cosign in a heartbeat, but such a statement on its surface would likely be small comfort to a man like Lee. Manchester should drive us to grapple with why does the Christian faith offer the hope for such healing and what does it look like? How much comfort can a man truly find who has accidentally killed all of his children and destroyed his family forever, even in the gospel?
Perhaps the first fundamental truth that Scripture could offer to Lee is that his assessment of himself is not entirely untrue. To Lee, the extremity of his failures is such that he is utterly undeserving of forgiveness or mercy, and if he were to receive his just deserts there would be only punishment and misery. On that point, Lee is correct. But the comfort of the gospel is that, in his undeservedness, he is fundamentally no different from the rest of us. The human condition is such that, when judged by our own actions, we are all equally unworthy of forgiveness and mercy in the face of God’s righteousness. We all share Lee’s dilemma, whether we fully grasp it or not.
10b “None is righteous, no, not one;
11 no one understands;
no one seeks for God.
12 All have turned aside; together they have become worthless;
no one does good,
not even one.”
Romans 3:10b-12
Scripture contends, then, that Lee’s state of self-loathing and guilt is a natural starting place for any fallen man, and as such a natural starting place for us all. The knowledge of one’s own inherent guilt and failure is the first step to one’s much-needed reconciliation. There is no level of extreme guilt that overestimates the depths of our sin. Lee’s emotional state, at its core, is not so different from David’s as he bemoans his inequities in the Psalms:
3b there is no health in my bones
because of my sin.
4 For my iniquities have gone over my head;
like a heavy burden, they are too heavy for me.
5 My wounds stink and fester
because of my foolishness,
6 I am utterly bowed down and prostrate;
all the day I go about mourning.
7 For my sides are filled with burning,
and there is no soundness in my flesh.
8 I am feeble and crushed;
I groan because of the tumult of my heart.
Psalm 38:3b-8
There is thus some legimitacy to his self-loathing, but the broken futility of Lee’s hopelessness lies in what he does next with that guilt. He leans in to his conviction of undeservedness and follows it to what he believes is its natural conclusion – his life is worthless and any offer of forgiveness from any source is undeserved and should be rejected. Even an offer of reconciliation from his ex-wife, he can only numbly refuse. He is powerless against his shame. “I can’t beat it,” he laments to his nephew.
Scripture, however, provides a path to healing by championing the acceptance of undeserved forgiveness from a source much larger than one’s own self. The gospel message is the story of embracing grace in spite of the full knowledge that it is totally and utterly unearned. The love of God that is freely offered and fully unconditional completely transcends any question of deservedness. Therefore, we find a distinction between a godly grief that draws one towards God’s saving grace, and a worldly grief that only sinks one into an endless spiral of despair and self-loathing. As Paul writes to the Corinthians:
9 As it is, I rejoice, not because you were grieved, but because you were grieved into repenting.
For you felt a godly grief, so that you suffered no loss through us.
10 For godly grief produces a repentance that leads to salvation without regret, whereas worldly grief produces death.
2 Corinthians 7:9-10
In the saving love that we find through godly grief and repentance, we discover not only forgiveness, but also the intrinsic value of our own lives and identities. We need unconditional salvation yes, but the God of the universe has chosen us anyway to be the recipients of his salvation, going so far as to give up his Son’s life for us. In that unconditional love is revealed our undeniable inherent value and self-worth as beings created in God’s own image. That self-worth stands true regardless of our own failures and shortcomings, no matter how extreme. Even if those failures resulted in the most unimaginably horrific consequences.
“The Christian Gospel is that I am so flawed that Jesus had to die for me, yet I am so loved and valued that Jesus was glad to die for me. This leads to deep humility and deep confidence at the same time. It undermines both swaggering and sniveling. I cannot feel superior to anyone, and yet I have nothing to prove to anyone.”
Tim Keller, The Reason for God
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We can confidently say that there is no quick and easy salve for the emotional wounds suffered by a man like Lee Chandler. The brutality of his experience is simply not something that anyone would, or should, heal from easily or quickly. Grief, after all, is a natural consequence of the terrible realities of a fallen world. When Lazarus died, Jesus wept (John 11:35), even with the knowledge of his imminent resurrection. Death was never part of God’s desire for mankind, and should be mourned. Lee lost his children, and a part of him will grieve them for the rest of his time on this earth.
What we do know is that God and the truths found in his Word could have the power to carry a man like Lee out of his spiral of darkness. The gospel provides the offer of undeserved forgiveness and a conviction of self-worth and dignity that transcends any past failures, no matter how terrible and tragic.
How would Lee respond to such a lifeline? It’s a deeply personal question that would ultimately be between him and God. But as the film draws to a close, Manchester does offer a sliver of hope that Lee might not have fully shut out any possibility of healing. Lee rejects the responsibility of Patrick’s guardianship, but he doesn’t fully retreat back to his previous isolated existence. He takes a job in a Boston suburb closer to Manchester and floats the possibility of Patrick visiting him. The film closes with Lee and Patrick fishing on Joe’s boat, which Patrick has inherited. It is the first time we have seen Lee voluntarily step outside his emotionally isolated existence, no matter how small a step it might be. The crippling grief and guilt is still there, but there is a faint glimmer of hope that, through his circumstantial reconnection with his nephew - someone who needs him and loves him - Lee can take a small step in the right direction. Perhaps this small step is indicative that Lee’s heart, while still in anguish, is not closed off forever. And with God’s help, the gospel’s powerful truths of unconditional forgiveness and inherent worth could provide Lee the true, sustained healing that has eluded him for so many years.
10 He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
11 For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;
12 as far as the east is from the west,
so far does he remove our transgressions from us.
13 As a father shows compassion to his children,
so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.
14 For he knows our frame;
he remembers that we are dust.
Psalm 130:1-6