Mass

Actor Fran Kranz delivers an outstanding directorial debut with Mass, a harrowing four-hander that unfolds in real time and is set in the most uncinematic of spaces—the generic back room of a small church.  The four protagonists have never met, but it’s clear from the onset they are involved in some kind of conflict resolution process with an uncertain outcome. Though many will undoubtedly say this would have made a better play than a film, there is a relentless, painful intimacy captured here that would have felt very different on a stage. The four leads all deliver phenomenal performances—in the case of the two women, Martha Plimpton and Ann Dowd, they are best of the year calibre. 

It takes over forty minutes of stilted, almost torturous small talk before we learn what has brought these folks together, but you have a pretty good idea by the time they sit down at the little plastic table the church has provided. All four of these people are desperate to find some kind of healing or closure, which is why they willingly subject themselves to this meeting, but not one of them believes that kind of release will ever truly be attainable. So they are left to share their individual grief and anger—which feels all-encompassing and debilitating for each of them.  Nevertheless, they commit to the conversation.

Kranz’s intelligent screenplay is either extremely well researched or derived from personal experience. Each of these individuals is eloquent in a way that never feels overtly theatrical because for many years they have been in a situation that has forced them to think and talk about feelings for which there are no adequate words. Thus they express themselves in ways that at times feel rehearsed, but always come off as totally organic to the personality of each specific person. They all have different styles of communication, and we come to understand what they are each individually hoping will come from this meeting, both by what they say and what they hold back.

Like a play, the building blocks of this movie are mostly words, yet a primary theme of the picture is the futility of language when it comes to overcoming dispair and loss. If any healing is going to come from this meeting, it will not be because of what any one individual says, but the willingness of the others to listen. Kranz explores how our inherent reluctance to compassionately discuss our most raw or deep-seated grief perpetuates and enhances the very pain we try to avoid by not talking about it. Yet this picture never wears its themes on its sleeve. Nothing about the movie feel simplistic or exploitative. It is a straightforward story about the difficulty in finding empathy for those you feel have harmed you, as well as the need to find that empathy. 

I have only two issues with Mass. They may both seem like nitpicks, but to me, they detract from what is otherwise a remarkably powerful picture. Kranz wisely does not indulge in flashbacks or other visualizations of the things his characters discuss. He even avoids letting us see any of the photographs, documents, or other items the characters have brought to this meeting. That is because this film is not about a single incident, nor even a widespread issue. Kranz and cinematographer Ryan Jackson-Healy keep their camera trained on the faces of their actors because the movie is about what these people are doing together in this room, not what brought these people to this room. But at one key point in the emotional progression of the story, Kranz cuts to black, and when we come back he has shifted from a standard aspect ratio to widescreen (a letterboxed image), inwhich the rest of the film plays out. I assume this choice is meant to heighten the claustrophobic nature of the piece and to mark a certain turning point in the narrative. But really, all this cut to black and the change in composition succeeds in doing is to yank us out of the room (something that can’t happen for the characters) and remind us that there is a director present—filming these people and making creative decisions. This terribly destructive choice breaks the spell cast during the first two-thirds of the picture—though I realize many viewers (especially those watching on a device rather than in a theater) may not even notice the switch.

My other issue is the title itself. Meaningless one-word movie titles are more than a pet peeve with me. Filmmakers and distributors don’t seem to place much value on titles anymore—I guess because all the good ones have been taken? But how a writer/director can devote so much meticulous care to crafting such an exquisite script and such nuanced, pitch-perfect performances from such challenging material and then slap a generic and confusing moniker on that work—a title that is both hard to see and difficult to remember—is beyond me. Were it not for these two issues, I would rate this film even higher.