A Pleasant Fiction and Manchester by the Sea: Grief in the Mundane

Spoiler Warning: The reflections below discuss key plot points from both A Pleasant Fiction and Manchester by the Sea, including their endings. If you haven’t finished either and want to experience them without knowing where they lead, you may want to stop here and return later.

I was looking for films that might have a similar energy to A Pleasant Fiction, and someone suggested Manchester by the Sea. Structurally, I can see why. Both are stories about grief told through a fractured lens, where past and present blur together and the weight of loss is carried as much in small, ordinary tasks as in dramatic moments.

The Mundane as the Stage for Grief

One of the things Manchester by the Sea does brilliantly is highlight the banal logistics of death: morgue visits, coffin selection, funeral arrangements, even the absurdity of trying to bury someone in New England’s frozen ground. The film lingers on these details, reminding us that grief isn’t cinematic melodrama. It’s paperwork, phone calls, casseroles, and neighbors who don’t know what to say.

A Pleasant Fiction shares that lens. Calvin’s grief is punctuated not by sweeping set-pieces but by broken dishwashers, pool maintenance, and black trash bags filled with the remnants of a family’s life. The ordinary becomes surreal, freighted with memory. The humdrum details of daily existence become the very canvas upon which grief is painted.

Guilt vs. Responsibility

Where the two works diverge most sharply is in the emotional register. In Manchester, Lee Chandler (Casey Affleck) is hollowed out by guilt. He doesn’t just grieve; he blames himself. His tragedy is so great that responsibility feels unbearable. That’s why his arc bends toward avoidance — trying to hand off guardianship, trying to escape the weight of living with what he’s done.

Calvin’s burden in A Pleasant Fiction is different. He never runs from responsibility, even though he resents it. He becomes Jared’s guardian. He tends to his ailing father. He cleans out the family home, even when left to do it alone. His suffering isn’t born of guilt but of endurance — the exhaustion of carrying too much for too long. Where Lee’s grief freezes him, Calvin’s drives him forward, jaggedly, with sarcasm and persistence.

The Emotional Vibe

This difference in foundation shifts the entire emotional atmosphere. Manchester is about paralysis — grief plus guilt producing a frozen, bleak stillness. A Pleasant Fiction, though equally steeped in tragedy, is alive with motion. Calvin’s sardonic humor, his restlessness, even his obsessive focus on minutiae reveal a man still searching for meaning, not surrendering to despair.

That’s why I sometimes bristle when I see readers or reviewers stop in the darkness of the first half of A Pleasant Fiction and characterize it as self-pitying or hopeless. To me, that suggests they haven’t finished the journey. Because the heartbeat of the book is not wallowing. It’s reclamation. The back half is about friendship, forgiveness, and finding a way forward. The story doesn’t erase grief — but it refuses to end there. The book forces you to sit in the discomfort of grief, yes. But then it asks you to get up and move.

Reclaiming Meaning

It’s important to note that A Pleasant Fiction doesn’t close with Calvin striding into a new life. Its ending is subtler, and perhaps braver: a commitment to move forward, even if the steps remain untaken. By contrast, Lee in Manchester by the Sea accepts that he cannot overcome his guilt enough to give Patrick what he truly wants. Instead, he decides to do what he can — what he is capable of — and that compromise defines his form of redemption. Calvin’s path is different. He doesn’t have the luxury of choice. The responsibilities are his, and he has to complete them, no matter how heavy. And when he reaches the point where it’s clear he might break under the weight, help arrives — first from unexpected places, but ultimately from the one person he knows he can always count on: Ben.

That’s the essence of what sets A Pleasant Fiction apart. It acknowledges grief fully while also insisting on responsibility, connection, and the reclamation of meaning. It allows space for humor without being a comedy, and it finds dignity in the act of enduring and embracing grief rather than in escaping or overcoming it. In that sense, it charts its own path — one defined not by guilt or avoidance, but by persistence and love in the aftermath of loss.

Javier

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🎬 For Further Viewing

If you want to see the visual tone and emotional texture behind Manchester by the Sea, check out the trailer here:
Watch the Manchester by the Sea Trailer