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Showing posts with label A Ghost Story. Show all posts
Showing posts with label A Ghost Story. Show all posts
Thursday, January 04, 2018
Monday, August 07, 2017
A Ghost Story
“A Ghost Story”, made on the cheap by director David Lowery for $150,000, is a testament to what movies can do, a reverie of DIY, taking nothing more than a bare bones child’s Halloween costume, a white bed sheet with two cut out eyeholes, and wresting all manner of meaning and aesthetic magic from it. The film opens with the unnamed central couple, played by Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, wrapped up in each other’s arms on the couch, a stolen moment between lovers, and segues not much long after to a moment of the two discussing a move that she wants and he doesn’t. Lowery sets this shot with Affleck, a vaguely defined musician, wearing headphones at his computer, in the foreground with Mara out of focus in the background, not only conveying the emergent dissonance in their relationship but speaking to how Lowery moves forward in time and evinces huge chunks of emotion in the simplest of frames. Soon after, Affleck’s character is seen slumped over the wheel of his car, dead, involved in a car crash we never see, because, after all, this A Ghost Story and ghost stories are always most concerned about what comes after.
We see his ascension to the afterlife, or the in-between, which is where the movie gets a little ambiguous, which is not to its detriment because Affleck’s character himself seems not to quite know where he is, in a long take at the morgue where he has been laid out on a gurney beneath a white sheet. Mara’s character confirms it’s him, is left alone and then leaves. Time passes in an unbroken shot. Suddenly, the sheet sits up, mirroring a moment in “The Mummy” where Tom Cruise does the same. That moment was played for laughs, and this moment feels kinda funny too, especially when Affleck’s character climbs off the gurney and strolls out of the frame. It feels kinda funny because it is rendered without music so as not to cue your emotions, allowing for the inherent awkwardness to burble up. Moments later music does appear, tipping you more toward an eerie poignancy, but it’s a helluva thing getting there.
The ghost wanders through the living, unseen, and then returns home, where he is apparently confined. This is when Mara’s character returns to find a pie left by a friend for comfort. She eats it; she eats the whole thing; she eats the whole thing in two shots that last four minutes with no music; she eats the whole thing in two shots that last four minutes with no music while the Ghost stands in the corner of the frame just watching. Lowery is sort of daring you to stay with the movie, sure, but he is doing so much more.
He is defining how the apparition can only observe, not interfere, at least not in any useful way, forced to see the person he caused harm hurting and left with no recourse to help, a specter in his own life, looking at it from the outside, left merely to observe, not participate. This is just as acutely brought home in a later scene of her listening to a song he wrote. Though Lowery places she and the Ghost in the frame together, by also flashing back to the first time she heard the song in the midst of this moment Lowery makes clear the chasm that still exists; she feels her deceased spouse in the past, not the present, though he is there and can see her, which simply makes the pain of what he misses that much greater.
Lowery also uses this moment to define the film’s sense of time. Days, years, decades, perhaps even centuries will pass by as “A Ghost Story” progresses, which, for obvious reasons, have to be conveyed in jump cuts, which are not explicitly explained though details in each new scene evoke where we are and how far we have moved. And so Lowery uses this scene to make you feel the unbearable weight of time, and the way that its passage will essentially render us ghosts in the places we once inhabited.
What might be most remarkable, however, is how Lowery, who also edited, makes you feel the emotion of this sheeted specter. Despite the eyeholes, you can’t see Affleck’s eyes, preventing his emoting, and while he moves his body this way or that, and sometimes goes for short strolls, his varying emotions are evinced through directorial choices – angles, tilts, zooms. You see the immovable ghost at a distance, simply looking on, in the pie scene and the melancholy is palpable, while a later moment, when he listens to a speech, a purposeful zoom in on the ghost from a low angle as he moves forward conveys the rising fury. This speech, delivered in a walk off cameo by Will Oldham, who is wearing overalls so as to communicate his existence as a Blowhard as much as the bedsheet communicates Ghost, concerns the meaningless of making art, of doing anything in a universe where time eventually renders all people and things as forgotten, sort of a hipster’s interpretation of Alvy Singer refusing to do his homework because the universe is expanding.
Lowery could be out to rebut this notion, seeing as how he scores the scene to Beethoven’s ninth symphony, suggesting some things do transcend time. And the film itself could also be argued as the refutation given its quality. But ultimately the meaningless seems less overcome through artistic intent than emotional peace, which is not easy to find as “A Ghost Story” illustrates, which, without spoiling too much, suggests something more like its own ethereal imagining of cyclical time, an endlessly looping journey to achieve understanding, an understanding of and a peace with the fact that no matter what we do, no matter what we accomplish, no matter what we leave behind, one day, in more ways than just the physical, we will simply be…..gone.
We see his ascension to the afterlife, or the in-between, which is where the movie gets a little ambiguous, which is not to its detriment because Affleck’s character himself seems not to quite know where he is, in a long take at the morgue where he has been laid out on a gurney beneath a white sheet. Mara’s character confirms it’s him, is left alone and then leaves. Time passes in an unbroken shot. Suddenly, the sheet sits up, mirroring a moment in “The Mummy” where Tom Cruise does the same. That moment was played for laughs, and this moment feels kinda funny too, especially when Affleck’s character climbs off the gurney and strolls out of the frame. It feels kinda funny because it is rendered without music so as not to cue your emotions, allowing for the inherent awkwardness to burble up. Moments later music does appear, tipping you more toward an eerie poignancy, but it’s a helluva thing getting there.
The ghost wanders through the living, unseen, and then returns home, where he is apparently confined. This is when Mara’s character returns to find a pie left by a friend for comfort. She eats it; she eats the whole thing; she eats the whole thing in two shots that last four minutes with no music; she eats the whole thing in two shots that last four minutes with no music while the Ghost stands in the corner of the frame just watching. Lowery is sort of daring you to stay with the movie, sure, but he is doing so much more.
He is defining how the apparition can only observe, not interfere, at least not in any useful way, forced to see the person he caused harm hurting and left with no recourse to help, a specter in his own life, looking at it from the outside, left merely to observe, not participate. This is just as acutely brought home in a later scene of her listening to a song he wrote. Though Lowery places she and the Ghost in the frame together, by also flashing back to the first time she heard the song in the midst of this moment Lowery makes clear the chasm that still exists; she feels her deceased spouse in the past, not the present, though he is there and can see her, which simply makes the pain of what he misses that much greater.
Lowery also uses this moment to define the film’s sense of time. Days, years, decades, perhaps even centuries will pass by as “A Ghost Story” progresses, which, for obvious reasons, have to be conveyed in jump cuts, which are not explicitly explained though details in each new scene evoke where we are and how far we have moved. And so Lowery uses this scene to make you feel the unbearable weight of time, and the way that its passage will essentially render us ghosts in the places we once inhabited.
What might be most remarkable, however, is how Lowery, who also edited, makes you feel the emotion of this sheeted specter. Despite the eyeholes, you can’t see Affleck’s eyes, preventing his emoting, and while he moves his body this way or that, and sometimes goes for short strolls, his varying emotions are evinced through directorial choices – angles, tilts, zooms. You see the immovable ghost at a distance, simply looking on, in the pie scene and the melancholy is palpable, while a later moment, when he listens to a speech, a purposeful zoom in on the ghost from a low angle as he moves forward conveys the rising fury. This speech, delivered in a walk off cameo by Will Oldham, who is wearing overalls so as to communicate his existence as a Blowhard as much as the bedsheet communicates Ghost, concerns the meaningless of making art, of doing anything in a universe where time eventually renders all people and things as forgotten, sort of a hipster’s interpretation of Alvy Singer refusing to do his homework because the universe is expanding.
Lowery could be out to rebut this notion, seeing as how he scores the scene to Beethoven’s ninth symphony, suggesting some things do transcend time. And the film itself could also be argued as the refutation given its quality. But ultimately the meaningless seems less overcome through artistic intent than emotional peace, which is not easy to find as “A Ghost Story” illustrates, which, without spoiling too much, suggests something more like its own ethereal imagining of cyclical time, an endlessly looping journey to achieve understanding, an understanding of and a peace with the fact that no matter what we do, no matter what we accomplish, no matter what we leave behind, one day, in more ways than just the physical, we will simply be…..gone.
Tuesday, August 01, 2017
When Cinema Gets Extra Surreal
The world lately is filled with so much noise. It’s noisy when you’re plugged in, yes, sure, with the excess of social media functioning as something like a fire hose inadvertently hooked up to gas tanks instead, just spewing more fuel on the fire. But even if you’re unplugged the world often remains just as noisy since it is always trying to plug you right back in. Get out of your car to fill gas and a screen above the pump is braying at you; climb in a taxi in hopes of just staring out the window for a few minutes and there is a screen on the seatback right in front of your face; sit in airport with your phone that no longer has any battery left and hear all the screens in front of you and behind you and to the right of you and to the left of you re-going over everything bad you already knew. I haven’t been to church recently but I just assume they have already begun with screen installations on the backs of pews. So, what do you do?
I like to go to the movies. Movies can have their share of noise too, though it’s often a different sort of noise, more like deliberate disquiet, though you can also choose a movie that you might suspect is more quiet and contemplative, filled with the sounds of silence, a place to vanish into another world conjured before you, which is what I hoped to get from David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story” a couple Saturdays ago after another long week in America. It started ominously on the train ride there when three apple-faced adolescent boys sitting behind my girlfriend and me had a conversation that either re-confirmed the awe-inspiring idiocy of teenage boys or foreshadowed a future even worse than the present.
The movie, once it got rolling after the ads, because there are always ads, started ominously too. Not the movie itself, which I loved and which I will discuss in depth next week, but the viewing experience, when a woman darted into the theater right near the start with a snack from the outside theater, a deli sandwich, or something, which she spent in inordinate amount of time unwrapping because the crinkling – the clamorous crinkling – unfolded against the backdrop of Rooney Mara speaking in the actual movie. Only after the movie did I realize that what Rooney Mara said in that moment was crucial. I wanted to retroactively scream. Still, that was nothing in the face of The Pie Scene.
The scene in question finds Rooney Mara’s character, in the aftermath of her husband’s death, consuming an entire pie in a pair of shots that span several minutes. It is a scene rendered in silence aside from the sounds of chewing and Mara’s eccentric dining technique which transforms pie-eating into something more like spearfishing. If some people have apparently adored it, other people have apparently abhorred it, which I learned about by reading Richard Brody’s New Yorker review where he did not merely elucidate his own thoughts on The Pie Scene but made sure to go after fellow critics who did not like The Pie Scene because apparently you can’t even keep away outside noise from your own review. I will absolutely excise the white noise in my own review, but the context of my personal experience seeing the The Pie Scene was so surreal that, dammit, I wanted to talk about that too.
As the scene commenced, thunderous explosions comprising Christopher Nolan’s WWII behemoth “Dunkirk”, which was screening next door, began infiltrating our theater, cutting right through the silence, almost becoming a kind of inadvertent commentary – Hollywood Cacophony over there, Indie Tranquility over here. But there was more.
A theater patron had entered the movie, like, fifteen minutes late, sinking into her seat, noisily depositing all her crap onto the floor and then tearing into her bag of popcorn. She was scarfing down popcorn, so furiously that she kept pausing to cough, at the exact same moment Rooney Mara was scarfing down pie. It was absurd; it was incredible; this theater patron could not have timed it better (worse). I had not been to the theater in nearly three weeks and had been desperately looking forward to this moment when I could escape all the world’s noise for a movie instead and here was the world’s noise breaching the theater walls.
When pressed in an interview on the scene’s length, Lowery said “it is an opportunity for audiences to decide if they’re with the movie. If they want to bail, that’s a great time to leave! But if they go with it and just accept it on its own terms, I think it opens all sorts of doors into how you can experience this movie and how you can experience cinema as a whole.” For me, the moment became different. It was as if the whole world was daring me to be with the movie. And so I noted everything happening around me, stifled a laugh, forced myself back into the scene, regained hold of its rhythm, and got good and lost.
I like to go to the movies. Movies can have their share of noise too, though it’s often a different sort of noise, more like deliberate disquiet, though you can also choose a movie that you might suspect is more quiet and contemplative, filled with the sounds of silence, a place to vanish into another world conjured before you, which is what I hoped to get from David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story” a couple Saturdays ago after another long week in America. It started ominously on the train ride there when three apple-faced adolescent boys sitting behind my girlfriend and me had a conversation that either re-confirmed the awe-inspiring idiocy of teenage boys or foreshadowed a future even worse than the present.
The movie, once it got rolling after the ads, because there are always ads, started ominously too. Not the movie itself, which I loved and which I will discuss in depth next week, but the viewing experience, when a woman darted into the theater right near the start with a snack from the outside theater, a deli sandwich, or something, which she spent in inordinate amount of time unwrapping because the crinkling – the clamorous crinkling – unfolded against the backdrop of Rooney Mara speaking in the actual movie. Only after the movie did I realize that what Rooney Mara said in that moment was crucial. I wanted to retroactively scream. Still, that was nothing in the face of The Pie Scene.
The scene in question finds Rooney Mara’s character, in the aftermath of her husband’s death, consuming an entire pie in a pair of shots that span several minutes. It is a scene rendered in silence aside from the sounds of chewing and Mara’s eccentric dining technique which transforms pie-eating into something more like spearfishing. If some people have apparently adored it, other people have apparently abhorred it, which I learned about by reading Richard Brody’s New Yorker review where he did not merely elucidate his own thoughts on The Pie Scene but made sure to go after fellow critics who did not like The Pie Scene because apparently you can’t even keep away outside noise from your own review. I will absolutely excise the white noise in my own review, but the context of my personal experience seeing the The Pie Scene was so surreal that, dammit, I wanted to talk about that too.
As the scene commenced, thunderous explosions comprising Christopher Nolan’s WWII behemoth “Dunkirk”, which was screening next door, began infiltrating our theater, cutting right through the silence, almost becoming a kind of inadvertent commentary – Hollywood Cacophony over there, Indie Tranquility over here. But there was more.
A theater patron had entered the movie, like, fifteen minutes late, sinking into her seat, noisily depositing all her crap onto the floor and then tearing into her bag of popcorn. She was scarfing down popcorn, so furiously that she kept pausing to cough, at the exact same moment Rooney Mara was scarfing down pie. It was absurd; it was incredible; this theater patron could not have timed it better (worse). I had not been to the theater in nearly three weeks and had been desperately looking forward to this moment when I could escape all the world’s noise for a movie instead and here was the world’s noise breaching the theater walls.
When pressed in an interview on the scene’s length, Lowery said “it is an opportunity for audiences to decide if they’re with the movie. If they want to bail, that’s a great time to leave! But if they go with it and just accept it on its own terms, I think it opens all sorts of doors into how you can experience this movie and how you can experience cinema as a whole.” For me, the moment became different. It was as if the whole world was daring me to be with the movie. And so I noted everything happening around me, stifled a laugh, forced myself back into the scene, regained hold of its rhythm, and got good and lost.
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