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AAt the center of the agonizing drama Mass is an overwhelmingly difficult conversation, the kind that makes you wince to even think about how it might turn out. Watching it unfold for almost two hours then is a sort of endurance test, an often suffocating experience trapped in a room with four people who don’t want to be there but know they should, driven by the vain hope that may be it might take away some of the crippling pain that they’re all stuck with. It goes deeper into the dark to try and see the light, asking tough questions knowing the answers will be even harder, a grim yet necessary torture chamber.
It takes place six years after a terribly familiar tragedy: a high school shooting. A room in a church is being prepared for a meeting between two groups of parents organized by a lawyer and encouraged by a therapist. Both couples lost their sons that day and have been trying to deal with their grief ever since. For Jay (Jason Isaacs) and Gail (Martha Plimpton) it got them here, sitting with Richard (Reed Birney) and Linda (Ann Dowd), struggling with their loss as well but also their responsibility was their son who was the shooter . .
After a first stretch slightly marred by an excessive turn of Breeda Wool as a nervous woman working at the church the couples are heading to, actor-turned-writer-director for the first time Fran Kranz locks us in with the quartet and don’t leave us until they’re done. There is something admirable about his lack of interest in combating accusations of stagnation, deciding that his characters do not take brief excursions out of his only place (even to the bathroom), and refusing to use any form. flashback to visually illustrate the event discussed. It’s an airless chamber piece, a sure bet that pays off almost instantly thanks to the four impeccable performances at its center, with each parent dealing with, intellectualizing and vocalizing their angst in different ways.
Their discussion is polite and delicately structured at first, influenced by the advice of their respective therapists, but soon Jay and Gail’s burning takes hold, a desperate, if doomed, desire to know every little detail about the patient. killer, to find a way to blame more. at the feet of his parents. How could they not have known? What did they not understand? What could they have done differently? A lazier scenario would have turned Birney’s defensive father into more of an antagonist, a nutcase perhaps (Kranz intelligently slips past the political debate early on) or just someone who doesn’t want to accept the gravity of what his son did. But what’s so sad and messy about Mass is that everyone here is a victim, including the shooter himself, a bullied boy with undiagnosed mental health issues, and therefore the breathless burden of finding someone to get angry with, punish, does not lead nowhere; it never will be. Jay and Gail were armed, perhaps expecting something more frantic but what they find is even more sadness, two people who also lost their son but whose grief will never be validated as theirs.
If it all sounds rather tortuous, yes, at times, but Kranz’s speed of dialogue and the quartet’s gnarled, blameless pathology make it a captivating, somber but never oppressive watch. It’s anchored by four ever better actors, digging into their haunted characters, avoiding the histrionics, and instead showing us the consistency of grief, still there, still a little hurt, rather than the one that emerges in a frenzied explosion. Birney, an actor best known for his work on stage, and Dowd have the most difficult roles to play, but they are both able to convincingly convey the unfathomable conflict of always loving someone who’s done something. also gruesome (Dowd’s last moment in the movie, a story she tells about her dead son, is a punch).
Kranz, oddly better known as the stoner of Joss Whedon’s meta-horror, The Cabin in the Woods, made an impressive start without sentimentality, a film of tough questions that shuns easy answers. Mass may not be a particularly pleasant experience, but it is a remarkably effective experience.
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