It doesn’t stop hurtling at that entrancing verve for the next nearly three hours. Manchester by the Sea is a delicate and perceptive story about tragedy that, quite miraculously, never becomes one.Īndrea Arnold’s dazzling arrival on the American continent announces itself early on with Rihanna’s “We Found Love” blaring in a supermarket. Lonergan has a real command of his film, but his hand is never forceful. In a few brief scenes, a terrific Michelle Williams shatters the film’s iciness, her raw, burbling emotion serving as perfectly timed catharsis. Together they maneuver through a difficult time, negotiating a way to live, and maybe thrive, in a world laden with loss. He’s warmed, just slightly, by the sudden insistence of his teenage nephew, played by the wonderfully natural Lucas Hedges. He plays a man past the quaking heat of grief, now mired in its long and isolating winter. Casey Affleck, hunched and saturnine, is riveting while seemingly doing very little. Beautifully rendering-or perhaps simply capturing-the cold and stony towns north of Boston, Lonergan tells a devastating story flecked with a simple hope. But he fills his film with an abundance of humor and humanity, treating his characters with a gentleness that gives Manchester a pale and sorrowful glow. Heavy and despondent, Kenneth Lonergan’s gorgeous drama could easily have been a miserablist slog. Together they make something fiercely strange and indelible, a beguiling and convincing map of a feverish American pathology, rather than rote history. Lucky, then, that Portman found an ideal collaborator in Larraín. But her performance would be insane and outsize in a more straitlaced film. Keen to that fact, Natalie Portman takes the role and goes for broke, delivering a performance of staggering intensity, pitched somewhere between method and camp, between impersonation and utter becoming. But, of course, any Jackie Kennedy film lives or dies by who wears the pillbox hat. Stéphane Fontaine’s camerawork has a wandering grace to match Noah Oppenheim’s elegant script. The thrilling composer Mica Levi has created a keening, evocative, almost threatening score-full of wailing strings that jolt and jab, like they’re taking a knife to Jackie’s well-heeled surroundings. The film is accidentally timely, as many in this country today grapple with the feeling that something huge has just been irreparably broken, a grief and desolation that Larraín prodigiously illustrates. It’s instead a woozy and captivating imagining of a moment in time, when Jackie Kennedy was mourning her husband’s murder as a nation reeled. Pablo Larraín’s swirling and looping opus is way more art film than biopic.