Sundance React: Rooney Mara, Casey Affleck in 'A Ghost Story,' a Haunting Tale of Love and Loss
It would be a huge shocker tomorrow morning if Casey Affleck does not receive a Best Actor Oscar nomination for playing a walking ghost, a man so wracked by grief over a past tragedy, he essentially moves through the world like a phantom, in Kenneth Lonergan’s acclaimed Manchester By the Sea. Audiences got their first glimpse at Manchester at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival, so it’s appropriate the actor is back at Park City this year playing an actual ghost in A Ghost Story, whichreunites Affleck with Rooney Mara and director David Lowery, the same trio who collaborated on the 2013 Sundance favorite, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints.
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This new film, which Lowery reportedly shot immediately after wrapping work on his first big-budget feature, Pete’s Dragon, casts Affleck and Mara as a couple identified only as C and M, who share a ramshackle Texas house and happy dreams for the future. But then C dies in a car accident, leaving M all by herself…kind of. In the hospital morgue, his sheet-covered body rises off its slab and shuffles into the hallway where a doorway to another world opens. But rather than passing through it, he makes the choice to return to the home he shared with M, taking up residence there as she tries to decide how to move forward. And yes, Affleck remains under that white sheet — which bears more than a passing resemblance to Charlie Brown’s budget conscious Halloween costume from the classic cartoon, It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown — for the duration of the movie.
Despite being a Saints reunion, A Ghost Story much more closely resembles a spiritual sequel to Lowery’s highly stylized take on Pete’s Dragon. Both movies, after all, are studies of grief and loss: Young Pete’s mourning for his dead parents is what brings the magical dragon Elliott into his life, while both the corporeal M and the phantom C are united in their shared sadness for what’s been lost and what might lie ahead. Personally, I found Pete’s Dragon — a beautifully made film, to be sure — to be suffocatingly self-serious, strangling any joy that the young and young at heart might take in the thought of romping around the woods with a fantastical dragon. (Say what you will about the original 1977 film, but that version of Pete’s Dragon at least has a sense of fun about it.)
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A Ghost Story is equally somber and serious, at times to the point of inadvertent goofiness. At the screening I attended, some snickering broke out during some of Affleck’s early scenes under the sheet, most notably when he silently communicates with another ghost that inhabits the home next door. The make or break moment for many viewers will likely be an extended take in which a grieving M binge-eats a pie that’s been delivered by a friend. Lowery keeps the camera on Mara, with Affleck positioned just at the edge of the frame, for what feels like an eternity as she shoves forkful after forkful into her mouth. It’s at once both the greatest, and most potentially infuriating, pie-related moment since Jason Biggs got hot and heavy with an apple pie in American Pie.
This sequence almost feels like Lowery’s challenge to the audience to remain in their seats and not stomp out of the theater in annoyance. And those that take him up on his dare — as you should — will be rewarded with a film that goes to bold, emotional places. Midway through A Ghost Story, M moves out of the house and C remains behind, silently observing as months and years pass by in seconds and new residents enter and leave through the front door. One of those residents, by the way, is singer/songwriter Will Oldham, a.k.a. Bonnie Prince Billy, who recorded a lovely tune for Pete’s Dragon and here delivers an impassioned soliloquy that almost resembles a song.
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These are the kinds of ghost stories I adore, thoughtful, slow-burning tales that treat spirits as metaphors for the tangible and intangible things we leave behind in the spaces we inhabit. (See also: my favorite film of last year, Osgood Perkins’ I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, currently streaming on Netflix.) That central idea carries A Ghost Story through some of its clunkier moments — made even clunkier by an occasionally overbearing score — along a narrative timeline that expands until it loops back on itself for a gasp-inducing final scene that’s been haunting me since I emerged from the theater.
David Lowery talks creating Elliot for ‘Pete’s Dragon’:
