‘Mass’: An Impressively Depressing Four-Way Powerhouse, Until the Walls Close In [Sundance]

It’s hard to say if the excoriating debut film written, produced, and directed by Fran Kranz, in being an extraordinarily depressing chamber piece dealing with the long-after fallout of a school shooting, is the last film we should have expected from the wacky “Dollhouse,” and “Cabin in the Woods” alum, or exactly the film he was always going to make, setting out his stall as a filmmaker of serious intent, to be taken seriously. Whatever the case, it is highly effective, and his talent undeniable, even if it does sometimes seem like it’s a talent for dragging nails screeching down your psychological chalkboard, or for torturously slow emotional band-aid removal. “Mass” features several of the strongest performances you’ll see this year (including an extremely welcome big-screen return for Martha Plimpton), and directorial confidence and cleverness that makes what’s largely a one-room, four-way conversation feel cinematic despite its deliberate claustrophobia. But there is also something ever so slightly suspect in its remorselessness: it makes you feel – my God, does it make you feel – but it’s possible to emerge, shattered, at the other end not quite sure why, or what do with all that feeling. 

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To begin with, we’re in a blandly anonymous Episcopalian church, as church organizer Judy (an excellent Breeda Wool) fusses about, arranging four chairs around a table in a big, oppressively neutral meeting room: plain walls decorated only with a giant cross, a vast expanse of brown institutional carpeting. Kendra (Michelle N. Carter) arrives, and as mediator of the meeting that’s about to happen, peremptorily inspects the layout, making little adjustments and requests in a tone that brooks no refusal. On their way in their car, Gail (Plimpton) and Jay (Jason Isaacs) drive up to the church and then straight by, Gail saying she’s not quite ready to go in. They park by a field surrounded by a fence with a little sprig of plastic ribbon caught in its wires. That image, bleakly beautiful like all of DP Ryan Jackson-Healy‘s spacious, elegant frames, will recur later on a few times, in a contrivance that feels like a cover-up, when Kranz feels his grip on the drama starting to falter.

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But the whole first half is sure-footed and deft, as Gail and Jay finally do arrive, followed soon after by Richard (Reed Birney) and Linda (Ann Dowd). Kendra leaves them all in the meeting room; they exchange awkward greetings, then sit down, and start to talk. We know this is a fraught meeting – mention is made of legal proceedings and police reports – and through body language alone, we innately understand who is seeking redemption and who is still burning with unmanageable rage. Still, it’s not until a little while in that the details are made explicit. Some years before, Richard and Linda’s teenage son shot and killed Gail and Jay’s boy in a mass shooting at school, before turning the gun on himself.  

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For a good hour of the film’s running time, Kranz’s restraint is admirable, his script allowing his four superb actors to find and flesh out their characters, so it feels like we’re watching people, not merely a situation. Each of the four manages the changing colors of their monologues. The occasional dime-turns of their moods with a skill that, if you sit back far enough to be able to observe dispassionately, is graceful, the crisscrossing of glances and the shifting of postures a kind of dance, with information lobbed wordlessly across the table in a weighted look or snapped-off gesture, as often as it is exchanged verbally. But the smooth orbit decays as the temperature rises, and when the action of a film is this close-up, everything is magnified so that the merest slip in the film’s patina of realism looks like a stumble. This is a movie, after all, and the nature of its construction means it has to move toward some kind of resolution. But that, in itself, is hard to believe – the actors do such a fine job of portraying their characters’ thorough brokenness, the soul-splitting depths of their grief and guilt, that even the tiniest nudge toward catharsis feels strained, unnatural.

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It’s surprising that “Mass” was not first a play. With its largely one-room setting, and real-time feel, and all four actors given moments of almost theatrical intensity to play, it certainly feels like it could easily unfold in a theater, assuming an adequate degree of flame-retardance. But it’s not until some awkward choreography at the end that one really feels the staginess of this set-up – again, both Kranz and Jackson-Healy make bold work of convincing us, for the most part, that this is the format the story wants to unfold in. And if anything, the scenes outside the room, especially those with Judy, suggest that Kranz could have gone further in exploding the film out into the world: some of the tensest moments, in a never-knowingly-relaxing film, come outside that hothouse room, simply by virtue of Judy, with her plaintive, puppyish eyes oozing sympathy and her poly-fleece gilet screaming “sensible, nice,” interacting with Plimpton’s hardened, sympathy-allergic Gail. There’s an arguably stronger, less neatly arranged film to be made out of the way ordinary, decent people can make tragedy so much worse with their good intentions and eagerness to provide comfort. But that is not Kranz’s intent with “Mass’; he is chasing a grander ambition, trying to bring closure to characters who it’s hard to believe would find it in this way, in this room, or just outside with the sound of a choir practicing down the hall. The catharsis is unearned and the final wisdom not entirely convincing, so all you are left with is an immense, burdensome sorrow that doesn’t belong to you, and nowhere to set it down. [B]

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