#155: A Ghost Story
Release Date: July 7th, 2017
Format: Theater (The Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, CA)
Written by: David Lowery
Directed by: David Lowery
3.5 Stars
It’s not always fair, but sometimes my criteria for “good” art is whether or not I could conceivably make it. Watching something like Uncut Gems, I’m blown away by the rhythm and frenetic energy and performances…how does a filmmaker capture that? It’s magical on some level.
On the other hand, watching the front half of writer/director David Lowery’s A Ghost Story, with its pretentious square aspect ratio, quiet cinematography, European art house pacing, and simplistic plot, I was sitting there in the Frida Cinema with D and getting a little judgy.
I could write this shit, I’m thinking.
It looked like the type of low budget, emo-hipster-white film for white audiences that would premiere at Sundance for modest critical acclaim (it is all those things by the way, including the Sundance premiere).
The film is about a married couple (Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara) living together in a ranch-style house in rural Texas. He’s a musician and she stays home…I think? It’s a little unclear exactly how they are paying the bills, despite their humble lifestyle. Anyway, he dies in a car wreck right in front of their home and then proceeds to haunt the house while his wife is mourning.
The gimmick is that Lowery outfits Affleck, as the ghost, in a white bed sheet. It’s an interesting visual, and surprisingly impactful. I liked the juxtaposition of grief with the kitsch of a hokey Halloween costume.
But again, none of this is that compelling. I’m sitting there in the theater, judging.
It’s not until the wife moves out of the house and leaves his husband’s ghost alone that the movie really starts to sing.
It turns out that Lowery has some things to say about not only death and grief, but about time and space. About memory. About the cyclical nature of existence. About human beings’ primordial need for home and shelter.
Eventually A Ghost Story floats us across centuries, depicting the site of the home in the future as a high rise development, and in the past with a pioneer family surveying the land. And there is our titular ghost, longingly seeking closure that will seemingly transcend him from our physical world.
It’s pretty stuff. The final scene, with the ghost reuniting with his past life and the woman he loves, brought tears to my eyes.
So it turns out that A Ghost Story is a beautiful film, and flawed. There’s a pretentious undertaste to the first act that I didn’t like, and there’s a soliloquy about Beethoven that I thought was poorly directed. But hang in there.
Lowry sticks the landing in the film’s end, and just like our ghost character, we finally arrive.
