Film rated R by the MPA.

For many, including myself, the decision to have both Pride Month and Men’s Health Month in June had always seemed slightly anachronistic.

It is an incontrovertible fact that the queer community has long suffered under the scrutiny of the patriarchy and its inherent queerphobia. However, as a man now in my mid 20’s, I often find myself getting into passionate discussions and debates about an uncomfortable conversation that many people, including most men, are not prepared to fully engage in.

The patriarchy has failed men too.

Manchester by the Sea (Kenneth Lonergan, 2016) was released just prior to the first Trump administration. It is the last vestiges of an era where a dialogue about the things us men carry was still possible. It is an honest conversation about the way that grief and trauma manifest in men’s mental health and the internalised, gendered expectations that expect us to ‘soldier on’ unwaveringly.

Main character Lee Chandler is a man who has suffered profound loss in his life. Depression and grief have ravaged him and relegated him to a handyman living in a microscopic apartment in Massachusetts. He spends his days as a husk, never dwelling on his grief except the odd bar fight where he willingly allows himself to be beat up.

Lee serves as a poignant example of the ways most men deal with depression, sequestering the opportunity for catharsis and diving headfirst into an isolation that he believes he has earned for the mistakes he has made. The reasons behind Lee’s isolation are left nebulous, as we can only assume the standard reasons why his wife and children are no longer part of the picture.

What writer-director Kenneth Lonergan does so brilliantly in this opening act of the film is play with our preconceived notions on who Lee is and why he is the way that he is. We assume everything from infidelity, alcohol abuse and domestic violence. Eventually, the rug is pulled from under us and we discover the horrifying incident that has propelled Lee into this depression. A simple accident with dire consequences.

While Lee does have a stable support network, including people who want to see him recover from the tragedy that has affected him, he is hardwired into believing he is stuck in a vicious circle.

As such, Lee adopts a false stoicism, personifying the detrimental philosophies promoted amongst patriarchal institutions that have allowed men to believe that being able to feel and express your pain is antithetical to who we are meant to be. The silent ones that harbour everything and express nothing.

Originally a playwright, Lonergan utilises dialogue as the most potent tool for expressing these themes as characters pause, trail off and interrupt each other in a naturalistic way. In turn, Lonergan dialogue is less in what the words themselves contain but rather in how their mannerisms whilst talking reveal the ways they suppress their emotions and frustrations.

The most powerful example for me was found in the character of Patrick, Lee’s nephew who has recently lost his father. Being a hormonal teenager, Patrick hides his grief by cheating on his girlfriend, sequestering his profound sense of loss by amplifying his masculinity and becoming verbally combative towards his uncle.

It’s in the moments between dialogue however, where Patrick exposes a feeling that many teenage boys have had to endure. That unspoken rule that you can’t talk about what is causing you pain. If you talk louder and swear intermittently over the course of a sentence you essentially puff up your chest. A skill that Patrick is only just starting to learn how to be adept at, riling himself up at his inability to express in tandem with his inability to have any standing against the adults that buttress their emotions just as strongly.

One would expect any narrative driven film to have a sense of denouement. A realisation or an undoing or a confrontation of the trauma these men have endured. The reality is not that simple. The patriarchy has programmed us to not recognise or even acknowledge catharsis. After a certain point, there is no hope. We embrace loneliness and petty fights and drinking because we are told this is the remedy. That remedy being that past a certain point, you have to accept the cards you have been dealt and live accordingly.

Manchester by the Sea is a warning for men getting into adulthood. It is a klaxon signifying what we could become if we let grief consume us and mix it with hedonism and isolation.

I fear very often that the dialogue will never be initiated again. I see the rise of figureheads embedding into young men that suppressing is the way. And accordingly, I see others minimise the pain that men experience as being invalid.

This film gives me some sense of hope that we can find a way again to have these conversations. To promote genuine empathy and understanding between those whose experiences we only glimpse at passingly. There’s no denying that some people are beyond saving, but there will never be a hard cap on when we are able to pave a better way for those who come after us. We must invalidate the patriarchy, the manosphere and all of its cousins. Now more than ever, we have to be able to simply listen.