Opiniões dos críticos

More than a melodrama about men, Manchester by the Sea stages the melodrama of masculinity. The film derives its considerable emotional power from its slow and skillful (albeit manipulative) revelation of these originary losses, particularly the gut-wrenching way in which Lee lost his family and has ended up where we find him at the movie's start: alone, shut down

It could have been shot on film, lit splendidly, the New England sky an omnipresent observer of every humiliation. Instead Lonergan relies on the poignantly ordinary surroundings, the hopelessly realistic, in order to better communicate the true horror of enduring hardship. Life will not be beautiful to better contextualize your suffering. It will always pile on indignities. You will always be just a human, governed by your wretched frailty and the randomness of life and death.

Without ever lapsing into histrionics, Lonergan's latest maps out the architecture of grieving by vacillating between mundanity and hardship with an erratic, halting, organic rhythm that borders on the arbitrary. Bonus points for the precise representation of the region's cultural artifacts (like Ipswich and Wachusett Ales, Newbury Comics stickers and Market Basket shopping bags), which is a real tonic after Spotlight.

Lonergan has made a film of great directness and simplicity that nevertheless constantly gestures at a larger complexity. Manchester has the feel of one of those elaborate, suggestive novels in which we know we have to work with the immediately available insights that we're given and fathom the rest for ourselves.

A piece of work so wholly untouched by the cult of specious optimism that it doesn't seem for a moment to belong to the 'It Gets Better' universe of the American Sundance indie. It is, nevertheless, a thoroughly American movie in its regional dialect and its imagery – the recurring 'pillow shots' of the harbor off Cape Ann owe less to Ozu than to the 19th-century views of Gloucester by Fitz Henry Lane, or perhaps Melville's "damp, drizzly November in my soul."

A film that—dare one suggest, like life itself—collapses contradictions into a sprawling, cohesive but variegated whole. It's a study of grief and reticence that finds droll humor in those very sources; a rare nuanced portrait of blue-collar Americans that floods its soundtrack with classical music, not because it's born of their world but because it gives form to their feelings; a mosaic of minimalism that occasionally and judiciously drops in scenes of operatic grandeur.

Maybe saying "uncinematic" is not fair, but you know as well as I do that the only reason Kenneth Lonergan directs his films is to keep his precious words intact. And [...] the more I am asked to acknowledge the "tragedy" of a self-centered alcoholic who is offered an opportunity to be of genuine service to others, and instead opts to go back to his self-imposed sty of self pity, the less inclined I am to see it as tragedy, and more inclined I am to see it as defensive indulgence.

The friend who urged me to see Manchester by the Sea told me that it was the only film she'd been able to watch since the election, the only work of art that had, even briefly, distracted her from her worry about the future of our democracy. It might seem odd to describe a film about unendurable grief and sadness as a distraction—a word we more often associate with entertainment, escape, and fun. But after watching Lonergan's astonishing film, I understood what my friend meant.

The film is deeply melancholy, broken, and painful, as disarming as 20th Century Women but with fewer gimmicks. Like Moonlight, it's a New American Classic, a film bringing movie drama to a high level that quality TV will never reach.

The film's articulation of grief not as a cycle but as a hardening—a pitiless freeze that won't even allow you to bury your dead—will only continue to resonate so long as there remain shreds of evidence that things may indeed never get better. Life's daily pinpoints of humor and twists of fate are deftly balanced by Lonergan, but by the end of the film, the fog still hasn't lifted.

Anyone who saw Lonergan's previous films is already familiar with his gift (honed by his years as a playwright) for writing dialogue that's at once intensely naturalistic and unforgettably lacerating. A scene between Lee and his ex-wife (Michelle Williams) turns a simple invitation to lunch into a spiraling crescendo of mutual guilt and recrimination that's as harrowing as any torture sequence ever filmed.

Lonergan rejects the platitudes about grief offered by more formulaic films, opting instead for messy, open-ended journeys that trade in life's mundanities and uncomfortable truths. Manchester by the Sea, like Lonergan's previous films, suggests that the only meaning to be found in tragedy is the wisdom that it's meaningless, that grief is not to be overcome, but to be borne.