Mass – film review

On the day there was yet another mass shooting in the US, I went along to see Mass – a deeply poignant, emotionally intelligent, brilliantly observed film about how emotionally shattered the parents of both the victims and the perpetrator become when a troubled individual decides to commit a premeditated mass gun massacre.

We are never certain of how much time has passed when we meet the two respective sets of parents as they are sensitively chaperoned into a room. It could be months, it could even be years – but we get the impression from the deeply etched agony in the contours of their faces, and their pained expressions, that the grieving process has been considerable and neither set of parents are anywhere close to getting the peace in their hearts that they clearly need, or the answers to how such a senseless act could have been committed.

When we first see the parents – who are portrayed by Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton on the side of the victims and Reed Birney and Ann Dowd as the parents of the murderer – it is the kind of scene that the phrase, ‘cut the tension with a knife’ was designed to illustrate. The air is full of awkward strained nerves, masked by the air of civility necessary to facilitate such a meeting.

The strength of all the performances in the opening minutes, is that they emotionally inform the audience of the gravitas of the situation, before the audience has entirely grasped what exactly has previously happened. Through their subsequent conversations, the audience pieces together how the incident took place and the many angles that all parties have come from to try and make sense of the tragedy. There is a gut-churning stirring of emotion each time you get a little piece of dialogue that sheds some light on the horror of it all. One of the agonies of grief is that the anxieties and traumas play over and over in ones mind in the hope of an eventual explanation. The film seems to have an astute understanding and sensitivity to how one’s psychological condition and sense of peace is damaged in the long, drawn out process of grief.

There is a lived in strain to all the performances that utterly convinces that they continue to be in soul-torturing pain.

The film is nearly entirely comprised of the four characters, sat directly opposite each other, with the reluctant willingness to open up the vaults of pain deep in their souls, but not necessarily knowing what the right approach needs to be. How could anyone have the right words when faced with such a loaded social encounter? As a scriptwriter, how do you convey dialogue for people who are not sure what the best way to communicate is? The script and performances do a wonderful job of conveying the difficulty of the meeting.

In an early move by writer and director Fran Kranz that ratchets up the tension considerably, we spend the first ten minutes of the film with incidental characters who are painstakingly and nervously prepping the room, to avoid any emotional trigger switches that could lead to all the tumultuous emotions between the parties erupting into something destructive and deeply damaging to the sense of healing all parties are faintly hoping for.

There is a sense that this whole endeavor is a risky experiment, in the hope of bringing about some much needed catharsis and possible roads out of the confusion. Should the parents of the victim of a gun shooting be in a room with the parents of the culprit? Fran Kranz asks the viewer to consider this question, and you are not sure how you feel about the meeting until the final moments provides some clarity.

One thing that does become apparent, is that the parents of the victim, have been briefed and counseled in the importance of controlling the anger that churns in their souls. ‘Remember not to interrogate’, Jason Isaacs character sensitivity states to his wife. The restraint that the characters are asked to show allows all parties to articulate their own inner perspective on what they have been through.

The effect is something with a mesmerizing intimacy. Snippets of exchanges between the parties inform us that the case has been poured over by the media and lawyers, but that only raw verbal exchanges can bring both parties to understand their various burdens.

The intelligence of the writing understands that it is natural for the parents of the victim to want to put a degree of blame on the parents of the perpetrator, but in reality there are no easy answers and explanations and root courses for why mentally tortured individuals decide to slay innocent lives and why this keeps happening. The film does not make any overt political statements, and directly addresses that to do so would be to unbalance the emotional delicacy, but there is a strong suggestion that to look for easy scapegoats by blaming the parents is a cruel fallacy as they also suffer horrendous trauma with many different versions of guilt. There is a strong sense that everyone around this table is a victim.

Most of us will hopefully never experience the unspeakable, unimaginable horror of either losing a child in a gun slaying or having your child commit a massacre. But this film does a tremendously realistic job of conveying the many layers of pain that each party would experience. At some moments, something someone says triggers a pointed reaction, but at others there are moments of connection and understanding as both parties see into the others great sense of personal loss.

It does all this with just four people at a table, but by the end of the film, so good is the writing and acting, that you feel you have seen all they they have seen, reflected on all they have reflected on and experienced these events first hand. It certainly puts its viewer through the emotional wringer, but you come out feeling a better person as it is a very important film that is extremely relevant to the issues of the day, but done in an emotionally candid way that you could never get through watching these stories unfold in the media.

The title itself is simple genius, typifying the film as very layered. What does Mass refer to? Is it mass, in the spiritual and religious sense? The meeting takes place in the basement of a church. Is it the mass lost in one’s soul when one losses a child? Or does it stand for mass atrocity?

Mass is a work of extraordinary emotional rawness. It takes one of the most contentious issues of the day, and captures the emotional complexity, agonizing confusion, and trauma on both sides when someone decides to commit mass atrocity. You come away from the film, still with no definitive answers as to why this keeps happening in America but a vivid feeling in the soul of what it is like to be a parent in this life-shattering situation. Understandably this makes it one of the most important films of the year and fully demonstrates the power of cinema to understand atrocity and trauma on a deeply empathetic level.

9.5/10

It is hard to convey what a masterclass in acting is given by all parties.