Dec 292017
 
three reels

A man (Casey Affleck) dies and rises as a ghost, returning to his home. He watches over his widow (Rooney Mara) for a time, but she leaves the house and he stays on. He watches, occasionally acting  but mostly watching as people come and go.

If you haven’t heard about A Ghost Story, it’s the film where the ghost wears a sheet with the eyes cut out and it isn’t a comedy. It also isn’t a horror story and has no scares. It isn’t about grieving although many seem to think it is. It says surprisingly little about what it is like to mourn. It isn’t a love story, although I’ve heard people say it is. There’s little affection shown between the married couple and in my mind they have a horrible marriage, but I suppose it might just be average.

But the film does have a meaning and it makes it clear. There’s very little dialog, but in the one long speech in the film, a drunken pseudo-philosopher states the point. The film is about the impossibility of leaving anything behind. It is about our importance, or lack-there-of, in the universe. Music and art will be forgotten in time, so the works of an average or below average man will barely outlast his closest kin. The ghost waits as time goes on. He circles back but time goes on. Nothing in the universe will ever acknowledge us and if we go looking, we will never find anything but the sheer enormity of it all. A Ghost Story makes that point well. It made me feel it, which is what the best movies do. Camus would be proud.

I wanted to love this film, but it takes its indie film status too seriously. If you don’t follow indie films, indie films treat their audiences like morons while the filmmakers, in doing so, think they are treating them as geniuses. Every point is repeated and hammered home. If something can be expressed in a minute, the film will do so in three minutes. If a moment is intended to make you feel, it will hang around five minutes after it does. And A Ghost Story is an indie. Scene after scene go on far too long. I understood what the filmmaker was saying in a scene, but I have to be shown it again and again. Reasonable editing and a respect for the audience would have chopped a third of the film away. Brilliant editing would have made this a 40 minute short. But the filmmaker believed, as most indie filmmakers do, that we will “get it more” if he keeps spooning it to us. And indie critics and patrons have latched on to the idea that being treated as a moron is a form of respect, so they like it, and thus some of the overzealous reviews and comments on this film. It’s good. It’s just not that good.

The best example is the pie eating scene. We watch Rooney Mara eat an entire pie without cutting away. Complete. Now, was there something in the 30th bite that I hadn’t learned from the 29th? Did minute 5 of this meal make me feel something I didn’t in minute one? I’m not saying it wasn’t effective, but that’s why editing exists: to make things more effective. And that scene could have been substantially more effective.

In retrospect the A Ghost Story comes off better as what sticks in my mind are the moments that really work. But those other moments were there, ticking by.