Peculiar ‘Ghost Story’ is shrouded in mystery and deeply affecting
Beautiful and deeply affecting,
A Ghost Story is easily the greatest movie ever made with an Oscar winner standing around in a white bedsheet for most of its 87-minute runtime.
Out of context, Casey Affleck wearing what normally passes for a classic cheap Halloween costume seems considerably goofy, but as with nearly every aspect of writer/director David Lowery’s thought-provoking drama ( out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday in New York and Los Angeles, expands to additional cities through July), there’s something else brilliant and moving going on underneath.
The film is presented in a squarish format, as if the main characters’ lives are being glimpsed through a retro ViewMaster, and they don’t even get real names. Only a scribbled note lets the audience know that Affleck is C and Rooney Mara plays his wife M, and their lives are forever altered by a car accident outside the suburban Dallas home they can’t agree on keeping.
C is killed in the wreck and after waking up on a morgue slab, covered in the sheet that’ll be the last thing he’ll ever wear, returns to the home. Unfortunately, there is no Handbook for the Recently Deceased waiting for him. He silently watches his wife weep and grieve his loss — without her knowing he’s there — before she ultimately moves on, finding a new love and leaving the place behind. Before she departs, however, M cuts a sliver in the wall, sticks a mysterious note within and patches it up. Before C can dig it out, a new family has moved in. From there, people weave in and out of his afterlife, the house ends up demolished, and he encounters the far-flung future before one momentous choice lets him experience the past.
Lowery has created what can only be described as an inaction movie. He lets the audience wait and think before events occur — the camera stays situated on Affleck’s sheet-draped body for a while before he sits up in haunting fashion, and there’s a severalminute sequence that’s just Mara tearfully eating a chocolate-pudding pie that’s brutal, fascinating and wholly heartbreaking. C has to passively watch events and situations play out in front of him, and cleverly so, too, does the moviegoer.
The white sheet, as simple as it is, is used to great effect in a variety of ways. Lowery offers a sly bit of humor as Affleck looks out the window and sees another phantom next door adorned in a floral option from the linen closet.
Although an audience can’t ac- tually watch the actor’s performance in a conventional way, Affleck’s sheet acts as a literal blank slate for viewers to project their own emotions. We never see his face, but C’s emptiness is still felt when standing amid rubble or his anger as a party is going on in what used to be his living room and a random guy (Will Oldham) goes on an existential rant about the universe collapsing and the legacy of mankind. “You do what you can to make sure you’re still around after you’re gone,” says the man listed in the credits as “Prognosticator.” While at times bleak, A Ghost
Story isn’t devoid of hope. More essentially, the best film so far this year is a thought-provoking, singularly special masterpiece about love, mortality and how our heart keeps beating even after it stops.