Every person undergoes traumatic experiences. Their quantity and quality vary, but once suffered, these experiences are incorporated into the person, usually invisibly to the rest of us. When they are not hidden enough, we may wish a person would just get over it already. Yet we marvel, when a person calmly reveals some past trauma, at the human ability seemingly to tuck such things away.
Kenneth Lonergan’s magnificent film Manchester by the Sea—poignant, funny, tough—portrays the human limits of this ability.