Anger turns to tears

In this age of CGI action-movies it takes courage to set a film almost wholly within one room and use the dialogue between four actors to carry the weight of the plot and drama of the piece.

But that is just what Fran Kranz has bravely done to absorbing effect in his debut feature Mass, creating a film that is both heartbreaking and hopeful, and (to my eyes) deeply Christian.

The opening shot is of an Episcopalian church surrounded by the barren hills of a Mid-West winter. A nervous church-worker prepares a downstairs room for a meeting, setting out four chairs and a table, a crucifix on the plain wall behind. Two sets of parents arrive. Both have lost sons in a high-school mass shooting (giving at least half the meaning of the film’s title) six years before. The difference is that one of the couple’s sons was murdered whilst the other was the murderer. What follows is an intense emotional drama in which our sympathies are pulled back and forth between the couples as they search for answers and healing to the agony of their loss.

Truth and reconciliation

The film’s director Fran Kranz has spoken of his long-term fascination with Desmond Tutu’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission which, through acts of confession and forgiveness, sought to bring healing to the deep divisions of post-apartheid South Africa. It was a process that commentators said could only happen in a country with a Christian consciousness. Franz says he was shocked not only that people seemed able to forgive, but that at times they would even find the compassion to love the offender. Mass is his attempt to give us a window into that process and in doing so Kranz has given us a masterpiece, not only of profound human sensitivity, but a work of art that points beyond the merely human.

The actors in the lead roles are superb. Jay (Jason Isaacs) and Gail (Martha Plimpton) are a blue-collar couple, Jay’s spiky stubble an outward sign of the anger that lies just beneath the surface. When asked whether the room is to his liking, he sarcastically replies: ‘Tables, chairs, Jesus watching us. What more could I want?’ His wife Gail (Martha Plimpton) is withdrawn and exhausted. Richard (Reed Birney) arrives from work in a hurry. Clean-shaven and in a suit, he is a man used to being in control, whilst his fragile wife Linda (Ann Dowd) speaks in hushed tones, her eyes constantly on the edge of tears.

What follows is a rollercoaster journey through anger, blame, a search for understanding and confessions of guilt and shame at having failed as parents. ‘I raised a murderer,’ says Linda in a moment of shocking honesty. As the encounter proceeds the two couples begin to see that they are not so different. One son may be perpetrator and another victim, but all four are grieving parents whose lives have been devastated by events they wish would have been otherwise. As Gail puts it: ‘Something has died in all of us.’ Eventually, she knows she must forgive because ‘I can’t live, I can’t breathe, I can’t hold onto this any longer.’

Kranz is not religious, although he was raised a Christian and went to church as a child. He says he set the film in a church to reflect his belief that forgiveness and reconciliation are things that exist in a more ‘spiritual realm’. They do not arise merely from the world of natural processes, but require something beyond to break in. Yet the imagery Kranz uses to convey this is more than ‘spiritual’; it is specifically Christian, because forgiveness lies at the heart of Christian faith. Jesus is visibly present, suspended on a crucifix throughout the encounter. Mysterious horns or bells sound from another world in the silence which follows absolution. As Gail turns to leave the room a child’s picture on the wall catches her eye. It shows the empty tomb and resurrection to new life. And most powerfully, after Linda tells Jay and Gail a final story in which she wishes she had taken her son’s violence on herself, Jay is transfixed by the sound of the choir practising in the church hall above. As the music gathers in strength and beauty, Jay gazes longingly at the stairway which leads upwards, down which a strange light flows, and at last his anger turns to tears.

MASS
Director Fran Kranz
Cert 12. Run time: 1hr 51mins
K release January 2022 in cinemas and on Sky Cinema.