Bleecker Street
There’s a sort of unfairness inherent in certain sorts of subjects for movies, anything about self-harm or harming innocents, because there are always people that can relate to it. And sometimes it is intentionally ‘brought from the headlines’ as a way to have a more dramatic commentary on the subject. But it’s unfair because it’s hard for victims to watch such things and it’s unfair because the artists have a restricted audience — so it’s a delicate balancing act to be sure.
The film Mass comes from writer/director Fran Kranz, whom I recall many years ago talking about a desire to make his own movies after his time as an actor in the great horror-comedy Cabin in the Woods. This movie is about as far from that one as you could possibly imagine, so I respect that he’s going his own non-genre path.
The movie takes place in a room in a church, a neutral place to mediate a conversation between two couples. At first we don’t know exactly what went wrong between them, only something awful. There’s the first couple Jay (Jason Isaacs) and Gail (Martha Plimpton), who seem reluctant, for reasons that become clear, and the other couple Richard (Reed Birney) and Linda (Ann Dowd) are helpful but not entirely so.
This tale is told essentially in real time, so we start with that ‘awkward’ pre-conversation for a while, and there’s an undercurrent of sadness we only begin to understand. Finally after teasing us for a while, we find out what happened — the son of Richard and Linda was involved in a school shooting and Jay and Gail’s son was killed, right before the shooter also died.
Thus begins a fascinating, harrowing back and forth, as the family of the victim seeks to understand the ‘why’ of it, but the family of the shooter wants to express how things aren’t exactly easy for them either. The characters have well-considered personalities, driving the conversations in different ways. Jay is the one pushing toward answers, his anger palpable, and Richard is defensive but trying to be logical, as much as one can be in the face of the illogical.
Whether or not catharsis is gained or is even possible is probably open to interpretation, but the movie handles the gory details in a more subtle, careful way. There’s nothing about the ‘literal’ gory details, sparing us such traumatic memories, and we never cut to a flashback or even seen the faces of the two boys.
A lot of this is centered around the powerful performances of these four actors, demonstrating depth in their bouncing off each other and vying for our sympathy. It’s a fairly simple sort of movie from a visual perspective, but not in a bad way — the movie never gets in its own way nor does it muddle things.
It’s a pretty impressive feature film debut in its own way, a low-key sort of concept with everything all about the way these actors tell us their stories. I would hope he doesn’t delve too much into this sort of thing in the same way again, but I didn’t realize Fran Kranz had made the movie until I saw the credits — it was a nice surprise. I’m definitely fascinated to see what he does next.
Mass has a run time of 1 hour 50 minutes and is rated PG-13 for thematic content and brief strong language.
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