Using just a few actors, a great idea and a dirty white sheet, David Lowery’s “A Ghost Story” is one of the biggest little movies in some time.
Intimate and cosmic, “A Ghost Story” hurtles through all of space and time, but does so without ever leaving the house. It explores the contours of a few VERY BIG questions, yet it undercuts its seriousness with moments of absurd comedy. It casts a small love story against a cruel and enormous current of time.
Here’s a film that is by turns hilarious, heartbreaking, brilliant, boring, maddening and thrilling, and somehow its disparate pieces come together, for a one-of-a-kind head trip in the tradition of “2001: A Space Odyssey” or “Tree of Life,” but at a fraction of the cost and running time. Also, Kesha is in it.
Given how weird and wonderful an experience “A Ghost Story” can be, I don’t want to spoil any of its surprises. Except for this one: Casey Affleck dies.
His nameless character dies, in fact, almost immediately. After his nameless widow (played by Rooney Mara) identifies him at the morgue, Affleck’s ghost rises, now wearing a white gurney sheet with eye holes cut into it. Ghost Affleck refuses entry into the afterlife, opting instead to walk (float?) back to his lovely one-story home, where he watches Mara grieve.
The deeper Ghost Affleck delves into his ghost life, the more his identity gets scrubbed away (in fact, the figure under the sheet wasn’t always the Oscar-winning actor; a surrogate filled in during reshoots).
Ghost Affleck finds people in his house he doesn’t recognize, a sweet Hispanic family or a merry band of bohemians. At a house party featuring a Kesha cameo, Affleck listens as Bonnie “Prince” Billy frontman Will Oldham delivers an inebriated movie monologue of bleak philosophical musings that tie together everything the movie is trying to say.
Lowery (who also directed Affleck and Mara in the outlaw romance “Ain’t Them Bodies Saints”) has said in interviews that he made “A Ghost Story” to combat an existential crisis.
He had just directed “Pete’s Dragon” for Disney and was looking for a smaller project to help him come down from his big-budget experience. Around this time, Lowery became paralyzed with the knowledge that everything he does and everyone he loves would someday soon be gone and forgotten forever. He was confronting a question most of us ignore every day: Why are we doing this?
Why do we do, make or love anything when our story (all stories) is nothing but a blip in the unfathomable schemes of a universe that will itself one day die in a glorious blaze of white-hot death? What’s the point?
Everything Lowery and everyone else makes and does might ultimately be for naught. But as futile creative endeavors go, “A Ghost Story” is less futile than most.
Lowery knows what he’s doing. He shot the movie in a squarish aspect ratio and gave the frame the rounded corners of an old silent film — an appropriate choice given the long stretches of “A Ghost Story” that contain no dialogue. In lieu of spoken words, Lowery utilizes flashbacks, flash-forwards, subtitles and a recurring musical theme, variations of the soaring Dark Rooms track “I Get Overwhelmed.”
Like Christopher Nolan’s “Dunkirk,” “A Ghost Story” takes advantage of the one thing movies do better than any other medium: transcend time — and, in turn, make us question our relationship to it. Indeed, the tagline of “A Ghost Story” is “It’s all about time.”
Great movies that futz with time are a sort of revenge. Time might conquer us, but movies like “A Ghost Story” conquer time. It’s a temporary victory, but it’s something.
A note of caution in watching “A Ghost Story”: Haven’t mentioned this yet, but I was on the fence for the first 30 minutes or so. In fact, I was a little bored.
These slow sequences might have you scratching your head (or pulling your hair out while you’re up there), but there’s an aesthetic and thematic method to the madness.
The first stretch of “A Ghost Story” operates more or less on a human perception of time. Things move slowly. Even the characters’ grandest tragedies can feel tedious.
But as Ghost Affleck becomes more ghost and less Affleck, the narrow confines of human perception are big-banged up to universal proportions. The first act is a leisurely trip up to the top of the roller coaster track. It takes a bit. Be patient.
In its bold design and its willingness to look a bit stupid — the ghost costume will provoke laughter, and that’s OK — “A Ghost Story” really had zero margin for error.
Part of the thrill of watching it is that at any point it might slip up and fall apart. But it never steps wrong, and it never loses sight of what it’s trying to do.
Best of all, it knows exactly when to end.
A Ghost Story
Grade: A
Cast: Casey Affleck, Rooney Mara, Kesha, Brea Grant, Will Oldham
Director: David Lowery
Rating: R for brief language and a disturbing image
Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes
Theaters: Alamo, Film Streams
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