Written and Directed by Fran Kranz
Photographed by Ryan Jackson-Healy
Edited by Yang Hua Hu
Music by Darren Morze
Starring
Martha Plimpton
Jason Isaacs
Ann Dowd
Reed Birney
. . .
"Table, chairs, Jesus watching . . ."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Two couples. Husband/Wife. Husband/Wife. One pair had their child murdered in a horrific mass shooting. The other pair birthed the shooter. I mean they didn't mean to give birth to a mass shooter. That's not something you do on purpose. I hope it isn't. Militaries and police forces and gangsters and terrorist organizations train people to kill. But a mundane Mother/Father/Husband/Wife-
I guess you got these survivalist types who train up their kids to shoot, but that's not the situation in this movie, Mass.
For reasons that are both comprehensible and mysterious, these two sets of Mothers/Fathers have agreed to meet in a community room inside an Episcopalian Church. Comprehensible, because the parents wish to clear the air. Mysterious because, um, the fuck do you say, exactly, in a situation like this? The two sets of Mothers/Fathers seem to be stalking closure, healing, a chance to have their pain and grief acknowledged face-to-face, in the flesh, not filtered through the various forms of-mostly antisocial-media. I guess it's something like that. Close to that. Their conversation goes well until it doesn't. And then it gets back on track. Until it gets totally derailed.
And then . . .
. . . well, y'know, Mass is a movie which is trying very hard to have characters that function as close as possible to how people in real life function. No one draws a gun out of nowhere. No one dies on camera. There are no car chases. No one pulls off their face to reveal themselves to be Tom Cruise. There's a villain-the mass shooter-but no heroes. It's four people in a room trying, in some sense, to figure out how and why they got there. Dialogue is hesitant, halting, uncertain-and then it rushes out in a flood. Or it dries up like a lake in a global warming summer. Some of them are better at words than others. One of them has pretty much armored themselves up in the facts of the case down to the names of every last person murdered to blot out pesky emotions. Another has steeped themselves in neurobiology, brainscans, various trendy theories of socialization and deviance, words like 'psychopath,' and gun control advocacy in order to put a label on their torment. The parents of the mass murderer are able to describe their child's life in agonizing detail. They blame themselves, for what it's worth. The parents of the murdered child also seem to be punishing themselves for what that is worth.
The four talk it out in a pleasantly bland meeting room while Christ-on-the-Cross looks down on them. May as well be Christ-on-a-Cracker for all the good it does. Hey, maybe it would've been worse without the Jesus kitsch. None of the four seem particularly religious. What reason has God-who seemingly does nothing to prevent senseless slaughter-given them to believe in Him or His schemes? Not much. One of the four professes a belief that they will somehow see their dead child again if they can but endure, but even as they say this . . . mm, I think it's pretty clear they know they'll never see their child again but they cannot change their feelings on a dime, just because the world tells them they should get over it right about now.
The acting is excellent. Soundtrack is mostly sparse, just people talking. Camera changes aspect ratios to evoke intimacy and distance and alienation and imprisonment within grief. The four are framed as a group, as couples, as individuals, as alone in separate universes of pain, as together in a universe of pain. There's no absolute framing of anyone or anything.
Mass is all but unbearably tragic. No closure. No phony catharsis. No insights that the four didn't have before agreeing to meet face-to-face. No bogus faith-based messaging. No naive hope that a nation-the USofA-where there are more guns than humans will ever embrace sane gun control. Just moments in an awful timeline of devastated people choosing to live and endure and try whatever they can think of to understand their pain. It's well worth your time if you're feeling up to it.
