On Kenneth Lonergan

Every day I wake up and instantly feel a wave of anguish at Kenneth Lonergan not being a household name. While he isn’t exactly overlooked—his three directed movies have enjoyed increasing critical acclaim throughout the years—the public clearly doesn’t recognize how much of a genius he is, even with his star-studded casts. Take Manchester by the Sea (2016), a film nominated for six Academy Awards, winning both Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay. On Letterboxd, it’s only the 11th-most popular movie for that year, right behind Split and Your Name, and blocked off from the world by the all-consuming shadow of La La Land. I don’t have anything against La La Land, but Manchester by the Sea is about two thousand times better. And yet you’re most likely to be exposed to it through a chic Reels edit with 2.1k views set to the music of Geese’s “Au Pays du Cocaine.” If you don’t know what that is, then you may never come across this film in your life.

Kenneth Lonergan started off as a New York City playwright until he began writing screenplays to finance his stage career. The first script he wrote eventually became Analyze This, a 1999 gangster film starring Robert De Niro, and in 2002, he stepped in to write on Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York after the previous hire stepped away from the project. His own feature films, however, are the fully realized expression of his enormous talent. Lonergan has only made three films across a 26-year directing career: Manchester by the Sea, You Can Count on Me (2000), and Margaret (2011). The characters in these movies are not gangsters. They’re not the typical indie oddballs and misfits, nor are they perfectly integrated members of a society. They are somewhere between, so incredibly close to normal life, but also lost in the world and living with the irreparable knowledge that some of their traumas will stay with them forever. This makes Lonergan’s movies so heartbreaking, so intimate, and full of a sad tension that pervades almost every interaction. In a weird way, I envision them as the blueprint for the Safdie brothers’ current regime of anxiety-based conversation, where the characters have a frustrating, building disconnect that manifests in their interactions. Nowhere is this disconnect clearer than in Margaret, where Lisa has witnessed a bus accident that killed a woman. Feeling like the accident was partly her fault, she goes to the bus driver’s house to talk to him, only to find that he’s completely blocked out that painful memory. Check out this snippet of dialogue from the beginning of the scene:

MRS MARETTI: Hi, can I help you?

LISA: Hi. I'm sorry to bother you. My name is Lisa Cohen. I was involved in the same accident that Mr Maretti was involved in a few weeks ago...

MRS MARETTI: Oh my God, were you? Oh my God, whata thing, huh?

LISA: Yeah...I was just wondering if I could talk to him for a minute. Is he home?

MRS MARETTI: Ummmmm, yeah, sure. Whyn't you come in.

(Lisa follows Mrs Maretti into the small apartment. O.C. we hear two small boys running around and shouting. MARETTI is watching TV. Mrs Maretti goes over and speaks to him, low. Hе sees LISA and slowly gets up.)

LISA: Hi. I'm really sorry to bother you...We never met. My name is Lisa Cohen...

MARETTI: Yeah...What can I do for you?

LISA: Well...do you remember me? From the bus accident?

MARETTI: I don't know...What's this about?

LISA: Well, would it be OK if I talked to you for a minute?

MARETTI: What do you want to talk about? I don't understand.

LISA: I'd just like to talk about the accident for a minute. I don't want anything, and I'm not here to do anything bad. I just wanted to talk to you about it.

MARETTI: How did you get my address?

LISA: It's in the phone book. I was gonna call first...

MARETTI: Well, it woulda been better if you woulda called. We're about to sit down...

(Mrs Maretti has drifted back toward them.)

MARETTI (CONT'D): I don't get what, uh...Yeah all right. Let's go outside.

LISA: I'm sorry: Could I use your bathroom?

MARETTI: No, let's just go outside.

MRS MARETTI: Oh Gerry, let her use the bathroom.

MARETTI: No, I don't want her to use the bathroom. I don't understand what this is.

MRS MARETTI: It's right over there, honey. (turning) Will you kids settle down, please! I'm not kiddin'!

(Lisa goes in the bathroom.)

MARETTI: What's the matter with you? MRS MARETTI: Who is she?

MARETTI: She's some girl who was at the accident-- MRS MARETTI: Nothin's the matter with me, let her use the fuckin' bathroom.

This scene, which goes on for another seven and a half pages and only grows in tension, is just one of many that escalate the emotional intensity of the epic Margaret, which—no offense to Paul Thomas Anderson—is almost like a superior, less structured version of his Magnolia (1999). On a basic level, Lisa has been dealing with the aftermath of this bus accident that she feels partially responsible for, and finally decides to confront Maretti about it, and yet that’s only about ten percent of the scene. This interaction just oozes frustration and discomfort from every pore of its being: no one confesses, nothing explodes, and any attempt to get closer to the heart of the matter takes the conversation in an even worse direction. This is also where Magnolia, or any less deftly handled film, would insert a monologue that lays out the “theme,” but here, every line of dialogue just slides ever so slightly past the other person’s intention. Maretti keeps repeating “I don’t understand,” not because he doesn’t understand, but because he’s trying his best not to have to confront his underlying guilt.

What Lonergan so clearly understands, and what lies in every one of his scenes, is that in everyday life, trauma hardly announces itself with an eloquent speech or a big crying meltdown. It’s more like a man saying he doesn’t recognize a stranger when he clearly does, refusing to let her walk down his hallway to the bathroom. It’s someone saying “I don’t want anything” when what they want is absolution, punishment, acknowledgment, or some repressed combination of the three. And this is the core of Lonergan’s greatness: in each of his films, his characters are continually circling what they can’t say. They talk way too much without talking enough. As stated by Casey Affleck, Oscar-winning lead in Manchester by the Sea: “I don't think that there's one single ‘um’ or ‘uh’ that I said in that movie that wasn't scripted.” These meticulously designed pauses compress conflicts until they are humiliatingly small—but these basic failures, miscommunications, and over-apologies are devastating because they reveal how ill-equipped we truly are to metabolize our grief. It’s an afterthought, an icing on the cake, that Lonergan’s small scenes also tend to build into something so emotionally overwhelming that it’s hard to believe life continues afterwards.

And yet, in his world of beaten-up and broken-down characters, life does, in fact, continue. Lonergan is so pedantic about emphasizing that the world will not, and cannot, rearrange itself around ruptures, so that children still run through the apartment and dinner still needs to be made. This, perhaps, is why these films are less popular than they “should” be: they are relentless, pushing on with the realities of dealing with failure and closure rather than providing the snappy, quotable dialogue that dominates social media edits. There does exist one instantly iconic line, a moment that encapsulates Manchester by the Sea, when Affleck’s character quietly says of his depression, “I can’t beat it. I just can’t beat it.” But that’s not really the big scream, the big revelation of a Lonergan movie: it’s more so just the dawning acceptance that no arrangement of words can possibly undo the mark on a person’s soul.

What does Lonergan himself say about his work, about what he’s going for with such small scenes of life? “More and more, I find myself trying to build stories from the ground up, so to speak; to try to construct a large emotional framework that somehow reflects the human experience, starting from the pedestrian details of everyday life. Doctor appointments, paperwork, the work day, the school day, bad cell phone reception, getting to a hospital, getting to the doctor, losing your keys, finding a place to park, etc. These details comprise the main part of your day no matter what else is going on, and it’s a fascinating challenge to build the story of a family or a community facing some of the most difficult problems life has to offer, without losing my grip on their daily experience.”

Letterboxd statistics, popularity rankings, and La La Land’s shadow over Manchester by the Sea are all just constructs in which I place my fear that a filmmaker who has so perfectly summed up the fault lines of ordinary suffering could remain, for many people, optional. We tend to think of the end of a film as the goal of its first two hours, but Lonergan’s purpose is honoring the humiliating scale at which most of our lives actually unfold. He places as much importance on Scene 14 as it does on Scene 70, even if the latter provides more catharsis. In a cinematic culture addicted to spectacle and velocity, that patience feels subversive, and that subversiveness isn’t attractive in the least. It is, deliberately, utterly repulsive. But it’s that refusal to simplify, to grant us the fantasy that something like death can be adequately studied over the few pages of a screenplay, which makes his work endure.

If you’d like to get started with Kenneth Lonergan, or you’ve seen one of his movies but not the other two, I’d recommend giving all of them a chance. You Can Count on Me is the most tender and warm, and it’s one of my favorite films ever. Margaret (meant to be watched in its three-hour version instead of the theatrical cut) is emotionally ambitious in a sprawling way that no other film is ambitious. And Manchester by the Sea is simply one of the greatest portrayals of depression ever put on a screen. All three are essential to each other; they live and breathe through each other; and yet they are so different, each its own complex animal. Much like their characters, the films of Kenneth Lonergan are a lot harder to describe than to understand.

Caleb Lee is a first-year at Columbia College studying English. He writes for the Double Exposure film journal, where he is best known for his work on “On Kenneth Lonergan” (sometimes shortened to “Kenneth Lonergan” or just “Kenneth”).