Manchester by the Sea and the silent language of grief

How Kenneth Lonergan’s latest film – featuring an Oscar-worthy performance from Casey Affleck – hones in on the numbing realities of loss

Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges star as uncle and nephew coming to terms with loss in this intense story

Perhaps there’s a carelessness in reducing a film so diligently layered as Kenneth Lonergan’s Manchester by the Sea to a form so simplistic as “a crying Casey Affleck tells people he's fine, for two hours”, but there's something brutally apt about the description.

Manchester marks the great lament to the agonies of bottled emotion, reaching its critical mass in a scene in which Affleck’s Lee Chandler is confronted by his ex-wife (Michelle Williams), who begs him to talk to her, just to open the channel of communication. He tells her that he's fine. That he doesn't want to talk about it. Repeatedly, over and over again, even though the words become choked and muted by his own tears.

It’s a moment that may hit disturbingly close to home for some: the memory of that deep, irreversible speechlessness that strikes in the face of such incommunicable pain. When words fail, and a new language takes over; one that's so rarely seen on film since its nature is so resolutely anti-cinematic.

Grief isn't always a flurry of passion: tears, broken vases and flowing speech. Spilling out of tongues that already have such deep, intuitive understanding of every fluctuation of loss. But isn't grief also the burden of silence? Slow and aching, sometimes it's the veil of fatigue that descends like a thick fog and makes it near impossible to see the world beyond one’s self.

Grief's great danger is how isolating an emotion it can be, and the destruction it can havoc on our own lines of communication. It's evident even in Manchester's opening scene: Lee is a handyman in a Boston apartment complex, he enters strangers' lives in the guise of a voyeur. With a nod, he traipses into their bathrooms and cranks things into place. He shares only physical space with them, nothing more.

It's a practice he's settled comfortably into now. Though Manchester opens on the death of Lee's brother (Kyle Chandler), this isn’t the first major loss he's suffered in his time. Not the first wounding, but the reopening of an old scar. Lonergan carefully layers in Lee’s flashbacks to his past trauma, flitting back and forth between past and present, as a reminder that those memories have made their presence permanently felt.

Manchester's outlook may be pessimistic, but there's truth in the sense that we carry our grief like old scars; weighted burdens that marks us, that forever threaten to be violently torn open again. Yet, still we persist. And that grief is carried and sustained because its existence is also so reluctantly natural; indeed, the realism of Manchester's depiction of loss is particularly striking in just how unexceptional the whole process can feel like at times.

The cataclysmic force of grief must give way to the ordinary: you can cry and scream and feel utterly beyond hope, but still someone – at some point – needs to get up and go to the hospital to collect the deceased's belongings, fill in the paperwork, organise the minutiae of their funeral, pick up and drop off relatives at the airport. It's in Manchester's quietest moments that its greatest impact can be felt, like when Lee opens up the refrigerator door and realises there's no food left in the house. The world can feel like its ending, but someone still needs to do the shopping.

That strange process, however, can feel unfathomable to some, particularly those young enough not to have been fully initiated into the strange banality of adulthood. Patrick (Lucas Hedges) wants no part of it, certainly; to him, his path to functionality is through distraction, by almost pretending the death of his father never happened. Instead, he indulges himself fully in his circle of friends and the careful trickery of maintaining relationships with two girls at once.

Death is final, so there shouldn't be anything further to experience after the initial loss; yet, Patrick slowly becomes overwhelmed by these creeping feelings of discomfort upon hearing that his father can't be buried until spring when the ground has thawed, meaning the body will be kept refrigerated in the morgue until then.

Lee and Patrick, his nephew now placed under his guardianship, find their paths of grieving increasingly divergent; nor do they have the capability of expression to bridge that gulf between them. As men, their silent mourning exists in a culture which actively seeks to suppress their emotions; to only further cut the ties of communication between them.

If there is a society-accepted language to be spoken man to man, it's that of violence. Lee is particularly culpable here, experiencing multiple violent outbursts at the local bar; though it's only through these actions that he can outwardly express his unsettled pain – I am lost. So lost. And I fear I will never be found.

The fact that rage has become the more acceptable vocabulary for wounded men is perhaps one of the great tragedies at the core of Manchester's suppressed emotions; Lee and Patrick repeatedly snap at each other from across their great divide like frothing hounds, arguing over who's going to take care of the latter's recently inherited boat.

All while that silent language of grief hangs above them, unspoken underneath the forces of easier emotions; if only they could just speak those simple words, “Yes. I miss him, too.”

Manchester by the Sea is available on digital download from 8 May, and on Blu-ray, DVD and On Demand from 15 May.