There’s deeper meaning to be found in one of the most poetic and beautiful films of the year.
A Ghost Story was quickly branded a Sundance darling upon its premiere at the festival this past January. The film’s general image (a dead Casey Affleck wandering around in a white sheet with cut holes) certainly has more than enough potential to be cartoonish. This is especially true in the scenes when he’s shown to conversing with a ghost from the house next door (played by Kesha, no less), which comes complete with subtitles. Yet any territory which would give audiences a reason to laugh is steered clear of thanks to a quietly spectacular combination of camera work cinematography, music as well as committed devotion from its cast and crew. Ultimately though, it’s the way this thoughtful indie leaves its audience feeling both haunted and moved through its profound comment on romance, legacy and the afterlife.
In A Ghost Story, a young musician named C (Casey Affleck) has moved into an old house with his girlfriend M (Rooney Mara). The two maintain a happy relationship in their new home until C dies in a car accident one day just as he is leaving the house. After identifying the body, M tries to move on with her life in the home the two planned to make their own as C continues to silently watch over her.
Virtually all of A Ghost Story is told from the spirit’s point of view, who spends the majority of his time on screen watching life unfold in front of him. He stands silently by as M sinks further into despair, until she can no longer take it and decides to move. Up until that point, A Ghost Story functions purely as a film about grief. Rather than showcase a number of scenes featuring endless wailing and crying however, A Ghost Story shows the maddening silence that grief brings with it, not to mention the longing and the need to function on some level. If such notions aren’t the most exciting to watch on screen, the film makes them positively cinematic. One of the movie’s most memorable instances, an extended scene in which our ghost sees M’s landlady deliver a pie to her while she is out. When M arrives home a few minutes after the landlady has departed, she goes about her business until she notices the pie. Almost mechanically, M takes out a fork and begins to eat the pie whole, slowly at first and then much more intensely until she is on the kitchen floor devouring it maddeningly, stopping only when she gets sick. Lasting for several minutes, it’s a raw and real scene in the film which speaks truthfully to the state of someone suffering the deepest of losses.
One of the more surprising aspects of A Ghost Story is its ability to not only be a tale of a love cut short, but also how it manages to make a comment on memory and legacy as it relates to each and every individual. This is shown in the different inhabitants who move in after M decides to leave the house for good. Although his love has departed, C’s ghost remains, watching everyone who calls the house their home for a time. In one scene, a party is held by one of the occupants whose guest (Will Oldham) shares his thoughts about the importance of legacy to each and every person, whether they acknowledge it or not. “A writer writes a novel, a songwriter writes a song, we do what we can to endure,” he declares. “We build our legacy piece by piece and maybe the whole world will remember you or maybe just a couple of people, but you do what you can to make sure you’re still around after you’re gone.” The excellently-written scene touches on a deeply embedded worry/fear which everyone ponders and struggles at one time or another, regardless of what life path they have taken. What mark will I leave? Have I actually done anything during my time here? These are questions which plague everyone. It is here where A Ghost Story is at its most surprising, by suggesting a larger, universal meaning as it relates to everyone and delivering it through the most intimate of stories.
Mara as usual can be counted on for a performance built on subtlety and deep emotion, which the role of a young woman grieving over her lost love requires, and which she of course flawlessly delivers. There’s an extremely short list of the actresses who would be right for this sort of film and the particular wavelength it operates, of which she it certainly at the top of. Affleck may not have much to do once he’s required to don the white sheet, yet it’s impossible not to literally feel his character’s pain and despair at having had to leave the love of his life as well as the frustration that he is unable to do more to comfort her through her pain. Finally, although billed simply as “Prognosticator,” Oldham may be the film’s mouthpiece, but he delivers A Ghost Story’s themes with such passion and conviction, that he nearly steals the show.
A Ghost Story will certainly go down as a notable highlight in the continuously interesting and diverse career of writer/director David Lowery, furthering his ability to craft wildly different stories around the core foundations of human emotion. His film made me recall an instance back in 2011 when my mother bought a new house. After spending months getting it the way she wanted it, she would awake every Sunday morning for weeks on end to a bird pecking at the front window. She grew frustrated as to why this creature was focusing on her home, and only on Sundays, until a friend of her’s suggested that the occurrence might have had something to do with my grandmother who had passed away earlier in the year. I’m not going to argue the validity of such a theory, although I definitely wanted to believe it. In fact I wanted to believe that my grandmother was still watching over her daughter so DESPERATELY. The same yearning flowed through me all through watching A Ghost Story and the thought that those who depart this world, myself included, will never truly leave it.
