Kenneth Lonergan writes people who cannot say what they mean and will not stop talking. His best films, Manchester by the Sea and Margaret, put grief and irritation in the same conversation, and we rate him highly for it, with one caveat about length.
Fi1m perspective
Kenneth Lonergan's scenes tend to go on a little longer than the people in them would like. Someone needs something, someone else cannot supply it, and instead of stopping they keep talking about anything but the thing. In Manchester by the Sea (2016) Lee and his nephew Patrick spend most of the film failing to comfort each other, and the failures are where the writing lives. He has said he writes about situations that are too big for the characters, and that is what it looks like on screen: small talk under a weight nobody can lift.
He was a playwright first, with This Is Our Youth (1996) among the plays that made his name, and the plays explain the films. Nobody in a Lonergan film is short of words; what they lack is the right ones. He wrote and directed You Can Count on Me (2000), then shared the screenplay of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002) with Jay Cocks and Steven Zaillian, and it is the least like him of his credits. The streets and Daniel Day-Lewis carry that film; the romance between Amsterdam and Jenny asks for feeling the writing has not earned.
Margaret was shot in 2005 and not released until 2011, after long disputes over the edit, and it shows: 150 minutes in which everyone gets a turn to argue, and some of the arguments repeat rather than advance. It is still a good film, and Anna Paquin makes Lisa Cohen's certainty keep slipping into hurt without ever asking us to like her. Jeannie Berlin's Emily is the other half of the method, a second person whose feelings are strong enough to interrupt the lead's. Lonergan is good with actors because he writes them things worth disagreeing about.
Manchester by the Sea is the tidier film and the better one. Casey Affleck and Lucas Hedges are exact together, and Hedges is allowed to be a nuisance, which is what keeps the grief from turning solemn. We laughed at their testy exchanges and were grateful for the relief, and then noticed that the jokes and the grief were coming from the same place, which is the point of him. He has said he has never seen much of a dividing line between comedy and tragedy; in this film there is none.
The caveat is length. Both films we admire most could lose fifteen minutes, and the second half of Manchester drifts when it should tighten. Some critics also find his subject narrow, one kind of loss felt by one kind of man; there is something in that, though Margaret is a teenage girl's film from first to last. He has since adapted Howards End for television (2017) and announced a new feature. We expect it to run long, and we expect to stay.
Biography
Kenneth Lonergan is an American playwright, screenwriter and film director. He was born on 16 October 1962 in New York City.
In 1982 he wrote his first one-act play, The Rennings Children. He earned acclaim for off-Broadway plays including This Is Our Youth (1996), The Waverly Gallery (2000) and Lobby Hero (2001), later revived on Broadway with Tony Award nominations for best revival.
Lonergan wrote the screenplay for Gangs of New York (2002). He wrote and directed You Can Count on Me (2000), Margaret (2011) and Manchester by the Sea (2016). He adapted E. M. Forster's novel into the 2017 miniseries Howards End.
