A Ghost Story. Written and directed by David Lowery. Starring Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara. Rating: 9 (out of 10)
It’s a film with no characters’ names, little plot and scant dialogue. Yet A Ghost Story takes us on an emotional journey not soon forgotten.
A film about memories, the vastness time, and our desperate need to own and to cling onto our little piece of history, David Lowery’s film is one long lonely heartbreak.
No mean feat, considering our main character is a ghost – the kind you imagined as a child – with a long, trailing white sheet and two black circles for eyes. He may as well be a mailbox or a shrub, as far as his ability to convey emotion is concerned.
There is minimum in the way of traditional plot: a young couple (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) moves into a house, loves and bickers the usual amount. She wonders what appeal the small, aging house holds for him. He is killed, tragically and suddenly, within spitting distance from it.
When she was young, the woman says, she used to write notes – her thoughts, her wishes – on scraps of paper and hide them in chinks in the molding and floorboards of her house. She does the same thing before moving on and vacating their home for good, leaving the ghost alone and desperate to read its contents.
New occupants move in, a mother and her children. The ghost is by turns curious and angry, and not above throwing plates around. They move out. If you weren’t already depressed to the verge of alarm by this point, the next occupants have a house party where one man (Will Oldham) holds court and gives a sermon about the inevitability of earth’s demise and our own transitory existence. “We do what we can to endure,” he says.
In this way, writer-director Lowery does nothing to assuage the current “what ifs” plaguing our society, among atheists, believers, doomsday-preppers, climatologists and worried parents alike. Lowery, seemingly a world away from his last film, Disney’s big-budget Pete’s Dragon,
The once-man espies a fellow ghost staring through a window next door. She (is it a she?) is waiting, but so much time has passed that she can’t remember what she’s waiting for. It’s one of the saddest moments of the film.
The camera lingers, longer than it should, uncomfortably so. First it lingers in the morgue, where we wait for so long that we’re afraid to blink in case we miss something. It seems like an eternity before the body rises up, sheet and all, and walks out into the world.
But that’s nothing compared to watching Mara devour a pie in real time. This scene is a masterpiece: several stages of grief are explored as the woman sadly, then madly, attacks a whole pie that a neighbour has dropped off. The camera does not cut away, a test of the audience’s endurance. We cry along with her character while marvelling at how the actress can do it, before the inevitable rush to the bathroom to throw it all up. If I was in charge, Mara would get a shiny statue for that wordless scene alone.
Back to that note. Lowery takes us into the future and then on a journey back through time to facilitate the Ghost’s obsession with the message’s contents. That’s when our own insignificance truly registers, somewhere between covered wagons and skyscrapers. But there is optimism too, in the way our little, everyday actions contribute to the fabric of earth’s story.
Not unlike Terence Malick did with Tree of Life, but on a quieter scale, Lowery takes the unknowable and scary and molds them into a film that ultimately makes us feel just a little bit better about what may or may not be waiting for us on the other side.
