Eternal ice

In winter, the soil in Manchester, New Hampshire, freezes so much that it is impossible to dig a grave-and therefore the dead are left in the refrigerator of the morgue until spring. In any case, this is exactly what they do with the body of Joe Cendler, a sweet merryman with a sick heart, who left behind a big house, a fishing boat and an orphaned son, a high school student Patrick. According to the testament of the guardian, Patrick should become Lee (Casey Affleck), brother Joe, who had long fled from Manchester to Boston. Boston is also hard. Gloomy Cendler works as a handbaging at an apartment building. Cleans the clogged sewer, repair the wiring, removes snow. If the tenant does not like something, he is to blame, let him go to hell. Lee does not stand on ceremony with women, with men, he generally climbs into a fight (and an extra mug of beer here is only an occasion). It is difficult to come up with the worst guardian for a problem teenager.

The first hour of Kenneth Lonergan's film has to be withstanded through force. The hero of Affleck is so annoyed by his forever dissatisfied face and stubborn egoism that a logical question is born in my head: why should we look at this unpleasant person? How rude to him with his nephew who had just lost his father? Chandler also counts every penny that will have to be spent on a funeral. It seems that the whole life of Cendler is a burden - so it is.

A sudden thaw becomes a flashback into the past. He lived in Manchester with his wife Randy (Michelle Williams) and two daughters. He was a cheerful slope, drank beer, smoked grass, climbed to kiss. But in one night everything turned over. The Lonergan shows this episode to the most sad music in the world - the piercing "Adagio Albinoni" Remo Jazzotto (it would clearly have come together in the film about the concentration camp).

The director of Manchester Kenneth Lonergan is a screenwriter of such paintings as the “gangs of New York” and “Analyze this”, but only the “Manchester by the Sea” written “for yourself” brought him an Oscar, and this is not by chance. Perhaps since the time of the "ordinary people" Robert Redford, American cinema did not know such heartbreaking dramas. Gradually, very delicately (even too - here the viewer has every chance to get bored), the Lonergan reveals the inner world of Lee and Patrick, who, after the death of Joe, has no choice but to hold on to each other. Lee stoically takes Patrick to school, take with hockey (of course!) Working and just sit in his room during a panic attack. Without breaking the tears of his father’s funeral (more precisely, on their staging), the teenager suddenly bursts, seeing a frozen chicken in the refrigerator. The whole script is full of such plausible details. Is it unfriendly, but still, trying on the role of his father, he asks a control question when, on the night after the funeral, Patrick leaves his girlfriend in the house: “Should I tell you that you need to use a condom? Joe would say? " Such ironic dialogs in the house, which smelled of death, are given by the cynicism of Woody Allen. However, the comicism of Lonergan is not at all cynical, his goal is not to amuse the viewer, not to reduce the degree of tragic pathos, but rather even strengthen it, showing indifference to reality to the suffering and joys of the heroes. It is not joke that the audience is not joking, but permanent flashbacks. The Lonergan uses a torn, anachronous, nonlinear structure of the narrative, completely confusing the viewer. Without the slightest moral training, he is thrown into the past that looks like the present. Who is this little red -haired boy? (Hint: this is Patrick.) What a naked woman is in the living room in Joe's house? If Manchester was a novel, then he, probably, as an Akutagawa story “In Os,” would be written on behalf of different storytellers.

Without this Plutovsky reception, Manchester would be several times more unbearable with its sterile, realistic Hollywood shooting manner (this would be outside human patience). And so - the viewer entertains himself, he can be a little detective to fold the entire puzzle of family ups and downs. Plus, the change of mood in the frame: a poetic sea walk on a boat alternates with cleaning sewage, the funeral ceremony with an idiotic discussion by adolescents "Startrek". The life of a common man is an intensely whipped cocktail of despondency, all known joys, stupid things and tragedy, and the Lonergan film is made according to the same principle. Even the happy end here looks like a grave freshly blessed in a thawed earth.