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Canberra Today 16°/19° | Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Review / ‘Manchester by the Sea’ (M) ****

WRITER/director Kenneth Lonergan’s gently powerful tale of ordinary people making sense of life’s vicissitudes ticks the right boxes and has, for good reasons, garnered six nominations at the coming Oscars. 

‘Manchester by the Sea’

That peer recognition is in no small degree due to Lonergan’s skilful construction of diverse narrative elements functioning as a cohesive whole. A family story moving between times and places, involving characters before and after important events and thus at different ages, needs clarity. “Manchester by the Sea” satisfies that criterion very well.

Casey Affleck plays Lee, first seen playing with eight-year-old nephew Patrick on their grandfather’s fishing boat. When next we meet Patrick (Lucas Hedges), he’s 16 and his father has just died. As the boy’s oldest relative, it falls to Lee to mentor him as well as arranging the minutiae of matters needing attention following a death.

Lee and Patrick are the film’s main protagonists, but wives, sisters, girlfriends and their mums, cousins and schoolmates also fill significant spaces.

Lee, carrying a heavy emotional burden for reasons that Lonergan’s in no hurry to reveal, has a short fuse that too often explodes in tavern brawling. Patrick, coping with hormones, has a girlfriend anxious to have an adult experience without her mum’s knowledge, while that lady is coming on to Lee whose ex-wife wants to make amends for rejecting him.

There’s much more in this gentle, comfortably-paced story in which credible characters make credible responses to credible events. Films like this one can deliver powerful and wonderfully satisfying and enduring cinema experiences without summoning extra-terrestrial, fantasy or comic-book heroes to provide fake and transitory escapism.

At Dendy, Palace Electric and Capitol 6

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Ian Meikle, editor

Dougal Macdonald

Dougal Macdonald

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