A Ghost Story

I will tell you right up front that this film doesn't explain well. I can tell you some of the details -- a ghost wearing a sheet with two eyeholes cut out wanders around his old house; a grieving woman compulsively eats the majority of a chocolate pie while tears stream down her face; an intellectual partygoer unleashes a diatribe on the fallacy of human legacy -- but whatever it is you have just conjured in your mind (likely some level of scorn, willing to appraise the film as something prissy, arthouse and obtuse) is very likely far off the mark.

There is a reason for that, and it is the singular vision of writer/director David Lowery, who takes this most basic of stories -- a young husband dies in a car crash in front of his house and chooses to stay behind as a besheeted apparition in order to stay close to his mourning wife, right up until she moves out and leaves him there -- and somehow conjures up an epic philosophical meditation on the fluidity of time and the cruelty of human convention. To say the film astonishes you perhaps even does it a bit of a disservice, it's far more quietly resonating than that -- taking a huge amount of emotional cues from background ambient noise as fleeting as a dim heartbeat, a steady wind, or the trailing away of the whirling wheels under a hospital gurney.

That is all to say, if you can find it within yourself to approach the film with an open mind, and refuse to get hung up on its nonlinearity, you might just witness one of the more moving films of the year.

We begin with the couple, known only as C (Casey Affleck), and M (Rooney Mara), living in the tight quarters of their small ranch house in an unspecified -- though certainly Texas-feeling -- part of the country. C is a musician, given to a certain quiet rectitude, leaving M, wanting to move into bigger digs, with the task of finding a new place. After the car wreck that kills C -- shot by Lowery only in the immediate quiet aftermath, the chirping cicadas providing the only backdrop sound to the vehicular carnage already having taken place -- M returns home, followed eventually by C, now as a ghost. M is watched over by the apparition as she struggles to come to terms with his death.

It is after she finally packs up and leaves that the film's decidedly fluid sense of time really kicks in. The ghost will stare at something briefly, the camera following his gaze for a moment, only to pull back and find a new family has moved into their old house. A Latina woman (Sonia Acevedo) and her two young kids (Carlos Bermudez and Yasmina Gutierrez) move in and stay a season or two before the ghost, out of frustration, longing or simple pique, starts acting out, smashing picture frames and emptying the cupboard by hurling plates before the terrified family. The next moment, a house party is raging on, with a man (played by Will Oldham, dubbed only the "prognosticator" in the credits) describing the ultimate futility of humans trying to leave anything of worth and resonance behind, as eventually, the earth will be engulfed by our exploding sun, and all the planets in the universe will suffer the same entropy until all that is left is scattered atoms.

From there, we jump ahead, as the space grows into a giant office park in a suddenly crowded city; and from there, back to the pioneer days, being settled by a devout family soon massacred by American Indians.

Through it all, the ghost remains silent, wistful. With his blackened eye-holes cut at a mournful oblong, a crease above the eyes adding a kind of beseeching eyebrow effect, and a long billow in the sheet hanging from the bridge of his nose like a baby elephant trunk, the ghost retains an emotionally crestfallen visage, unable to express himself beyond a shattered glass, a flickering light or a sudden crash of piano keys. In the film's most devastating moment, the ghost looks out the window, across the way to the neighboring house, where another ghost stands staring at him. After a brief exchange, the other ghost explains that they are "waiting for someone," but when asked who that might be, they answer mournfully, "I don't remember."

Under the simple but stunning art direction of David Pink and the beautiful camera work of Andrew Droz Palermo, Lowery's film maximizes its stated minimalism. As but one example, the film is shot in a 1.33:1 aspect ratio, the rounded corners of a near square adding a kind of filmstrip-like element to the otherwise studiously gorgeous cinematography. Time and again, Lowery treats the mundane ephemera of our lives with the elegant spirit of fine art. His scenes are often long takes, the camera slowly closing in, or moving out, adding motion to what might as well be a still photograph. The film is suitably haunting, making melancholy the exacting bargains we are forced to make in the course of our time on earth together.

The effect of the film, at times deeply heartbreaking, other times curious, often melancholy, is hard to describe. I stumbled out of my screening at Sundance one cold night in January, numbly crossing over the frozen parking lot back to my room, quite literally stumbling along, as if woken from a deep and troubling dream. At one point, I actually had to stop walking, take a long, cold breath, and look up at the myriad cloud of stars hanging over my head before I could move on. Whether or not the impulse was one of calm reassurance or painful capitulation, I still cannot be certain. Like the film's beautifully enigmatic ending, it remains mysterious.

MovieStyle on 07/28/2017