Evidently the state of American moviemaking has regressed to the point where all low- to mid-budget movies made at the periphery of the mainstream must be either triumphs or failures, as though all it takes to make an artistically significant film is merely an artistic vision. A Ghost Story, written and directed by David Lowery, is our latest case in point, a movie that has left critics and casual viewers alike searching for a word to express their enjoyment of a movie being marketed as an art film and deciding on “masterpiece” or something in its vicinity. Would that more moviegoers were as unafraid of calling an odd duck an odd duck as David Lowery is of making one.
A Ghost Story reunites Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck—they had previously played star-crossed criminals in Lowery’s 2013 breakout Ain’t Them Bodies Saints—as a Texas couple credited only as “M” and “C.” They live in a ranch by way of Brooklyn brownstone; there’s an old upright piano (which has been there from time immemorial), a record collection, a wall full of books (with a “NIETZSCHE” textbook suggestively centered in one cutaway shot). M and C’s relationship is on the rocks, ostensibly because Mara’s character wants to move someplace more exciting while Affleck’s wants to stay put with the house and its history—though I suspect it doesn’t help their cause, metaphysically speaking, that Lowery lets the early scenes of the movie roll on uncomfortably long.
One day Affleck’s character is killed, offscreen, in a car accident. Lowery shows us his mangled face on the steering wheel in close up then fades to the white sheet covering it at the morgue. An excruciating three minutes later, after Mara has inspected the face of her beloved and wandered out of frame, Affleck sits up, hops off the cart, and wanders back home reincarnated as ghost, still wearing the white sheet but with eye holes cut out, in the style of a trick-or-treating Charles Schulz child. He’ll spend the rest of the movie, and thus his afterlife, circumscribed by the perimeter of the ranch, trying to get Mara’s attention, scraping at a wall to excavate a note that she hid there, terrorizing future residents long after Mara is gone, befriending a fellow sheet-ghost next door, and skipping across time in a series of astrophotographic crossfades best left to be discovered for yourself.
Lowery shot his film in a tight 4:3 aspect ratio with rounded corners, so watching the movie approximates the effect of looking through a particularly high-quality stereoscopic View-Master. Here’s one moodily lit and meticulously arranged image that may or may not stir your senses; here’s another and another.
One image will probably determine how you feel about the entire movie and its peculiar admixture of melancholic atmospherics with cutesy frills. Some 20 minutes into the film, after ghost Affleck has come home to roost, here is Mara, sitting on the kitchen floor eating a pie while Affleck stands in the corner watching her. The scene lasts for five minutes; there are no camera movements, cuts, or music. For a certain kind of viewer, this is a purgatorial fate far worse than Affleck’s. I like the idea of what Lowery is doing—trying to concretize grief and loss through the act of eating—but the length of the scene draws so much attention to itself that it loops quickly around from touchingly absurd to overwrought.
Even when the movie speeds up after this scene, just how sophisticated Lowery is as a filmmaker remains up for debate. A shot of Affleck watching Mara leave the house multiple times in the span of 30 seconds, somehow edited to appear as if it were all done in one take without cuts, is an invigorating twist on the changing-of-seasons montage (though earlier this year director Terence Davies outdid Lowery with a showstopping portrait-session-as-passage-of-time sequence in A Quiet Passion, Davies’s film about Emily Dickinson). Other scenes in Lowery’s film are a different kind of invigorating, such as when an armchair philosopher listed ominously in the credits as “Prognosticator” (played by Will Oldham) delivers an interminable monologue on the futility of all artistic endeavor, the finitude of human life, and the inevitable heat death of the universe to a room full of partiers who have descended on the house long after Mara has moved out. Just when you’re ready to throw something at the screen to shut him up, Lowery puts us out of our misery by implying with a humorous jump cut that an enraged Affleck has blown him up.
Jokes aside, the movie itself seems to contradict the nihilistic Prognosticator by the long take and dramatic framing Lowery accords him (and the fact that he has more spoken lines than just about anyone else in the film). Lowery has made a film whose central conceit is that some part of a dead man lives on after his bodily end, yet Lowery also gives a loud megaphone to the philosophical contention that such ideas are hogwash. That’s a tension worth pondering.
For all of Lowery’s flirtations with the idea of the immortality of the soul, the nihilism of that kitchen-table orator has a strong pull. The movie ends abruptly when Affleck finally digs Mara’s secret message out of the wall and his sheet collapses into a formless heap, a ghost no more. What happens to this soul next? That’s the question I’m most interested in, but it’s the only one that Lowery seems too afraid to touch.
Tim Markatos is a writer living in Washington, D.C.
