A GHOST STORY (2017; director: David Lowery)
In 2017, we could use a reminder that movies don’t have to be loud enough that your ears ring for three days afterward. Movies don’t all need to shove you onto a rollercoaster that loops through a dozen explosions before it careens into a brick wall. No one needs to overact their way to an Oscar. An entire CGI city doesn’t need to blow up. Musical crescendos don’t need to pound you into cerebral dislocation. We don’t need a cut every three seconds. Movies don’t need to be filled with noise like an amateur radio show that’s terrified of one second of dead air.
No. Believe it or not, but movies can be quiet. They can take their time. They can also whisper and linger and stand perfectly still and be confident while they do it. It’s still allowed.
I’m not sure if David Lowery’s great A Ghost Story is the quietest film of the year or if it merely looks that way next to a summer movie line-up that collectively wants to run you over with a Mack truck. Whatever the case, it’s the kind of jewel of the arthouse that seems to have gone as far out of fashion today as its 4:3 aspect ratio. For a film about a dead man, it breathes like a living thing. For a film composed in older-than-old-school square boxes, it’s filled with space. For a film whose hero spends most of it speechless and faceless because he’s dead, an invisible ghost draped in a crude bed sheet with eyeholes cut out, watching his wife mourn, come apart and eventually move on, it lays hooks into you with world class skill.
Lowery takes on all of these challenges and does beautiful things with understatement and low-tech modesty. There may be no sadder shot in 2017 than the long take of Rooney Mara, her husband (Casey Affleck) gone after a sudden car accident, eating an entire pie over several minutes sitting on the kitchen floor of an empty house, just looking for some new feeling even if it’s pointless. This film is willing to follow her straight to the dead end, because a dead end is often a place to turn around.
Unless you’re talking about THE dead end. The Big Inevitable. The one that we’re all headed toward. That day when you suddenly no longer care what the weather’s going to be like, who the President is or how your skin looks in a morgue’s cold light.
What keeps a dead man walking in David Lowery’s plain-lit world is the search for closure. A ghost haunts because of unfinished business. That’s one of the oldest plots in fiction, but Lowery turns it inside out here and tells it as a blue rural dream. There’s nothing pretentious about it. Its lines are clean. Its storytelling architecture is a model of simple beauty. It never talks down to us or tries to sell us some bullshit. You could tell it over a campfire. Like all good ghost stories.