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What to Stream This Weekend

Movie: Manchester by the Sea

Director: Kenneth Lonergan

Starring: Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams, Lucas Hedges, Kyle Chandler, Gretchen Mol

Available on: Amazon Prime

We tend to have a very hard time talking about movies that aren’t just one thing. We either try to boil that complexity down to one element or else argue about either/or. When Manchester by the Sea began winding its way from the 2016 Sundance Film Festival to the Academy Awards, it got boiled down to two things: 1) it was the movie starring sexual-harrasser Casey Affleck, and 2) it was a film of unbearable sadness. The former argument doesn’t have any real bearing on the quality of the film itself, so to focus on the second one: defining Manchester by the Sea down to being a beautifully rendered soul-crusher of a movie not only does a disservice to a film that succeeds mostly on the basis of its complexity and deftness of tones, but it also does a disservice to audiences who might think they know what the film is about and choose to avoid it as a result.

To be clear: there’s a scene of utter devastation at the center of Manchester by the Sea whose implications spider out into the rest of the movie. It’s the kind of story where one tragedy dredges up memories of another tragedy, and characters don’t ever really get over it. But as written by Kenneth Lonergan (writer/director of You Can Count on Me and Margaret), the film is a much more complete and complicated picture than that.

The film opens with Lee (Affleck) working rather unhappily as a janitor outside Boston. Of course, the more you’re around Lee, the more you realize that happily/unhappily isn’t really at play for him. Lee is lost and out of place and angry and distant all at once. Then he gets the news that his brother (Chandler) has dropped dead of a heart attack, so he must return to his hometown of Manchester to deal with the arrangements, many of them having to do with his teenage nephew Patrick (Hedges).

Expectations begin to get defied almost as soon as Lee returns to Manchester. There’s gallows humor, yes, but there’s a surprising amount of lightness in the characterizations. Not of Lee himself, of course, but his interactions with Patrick have a kind of prickly familiarity to them that feels both real and blessedly easy. It’s these scenes where Lonergan’s gift for dialogue and tonal shifts is really felt. And it’s these moments that have felt most short-changed by the sad-movie talk. Not just because there’s some comic relief being glossed over, but because this contrasting lightness is an essential part of what makes Manchester by the Sea so good.

There are so many big moments in Manchester; these are the heavy ones, the dramatic ones. Lee in the police station giving a statement about the role he played in a tragedy; Michelle Williams’s tearful Oscar-clip scene. But as cliche as it sounds, this movie is elevated by its small touches. Like the scene where Patrick is told of his father’s death at hockey practice and his buddies in their big, bulky pads give him awkward one-armed hugs. Or the flashback to Lee’s brother getting his heart-condition diagnosis as his family reacts in incredibly different ways. Or the fact that Patrick’s girlfriend’s clingy mom is played by Miss Rhode Island from the most relevant scene in Miss Congeniality. These scenes, like the film as a whole, have been written by someone whose eye for human behavior is sharp and whose empathy for human shortcomings is vast.

Amazon Studios played a very smart strategy with Manchester by the Sea, opening it in theaters and following a traditional Oscar-movie roll-out instead of just making it available on its streaming platform from the break. But now it’s settled into its home on Prime Video, a testament to Amazon’s first big success story in film. If you’ve been waiting to be able to watch at home, wait no longer.

Where to stream Manchester by the Sea