David Lowery (2017)
The title is as simply explanatory as the title of David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013) was baffling. The two films have things in common, though: both are love stories, set in Texas, with Casey Affleck and Rooney Mara in the leads. The third major presence in Lowery’s latest is a house – where the Affleck-Mara couple live and which, after he’s died in a car accident, the ghost of C (Affleck) haunts, persisting there even once M (Mara) has moved away. A Ghost Story was filmed in a few weeks, in the late summer of 2016, for only $100,000. In keeping with its small budget, it’s getting noticed thanks principally to its central image. C’s wraith appears in the simplest and most primitive of ghostly forms – a white sheet with two eyeholes. I found A Ghost Story increasingly exasperating but I’m glad I stayed for the Q&A with David Lowery that followed the screening I went to at Curzon Soho – and not just because there were some good, unusually succinct questions. Lowery was personable, articulate and candid about the development and making of the film. He didn’t change my mind about it but he clarified a good deal. If I’d left without hearing him, my feelings about A Ghost Story would be more negative than they are.
C’s death occurs only ten or so minutes into the film but these are enough to give real substance to his life with M. A musician, he is sometimes preoccupied with composing, sometimes happily relaxed in her company, as she is in his (it’s not clear what her work is). They disagree about leaving the house – she wants to but he’d rather stay. M recollects moving from one place to another when she was young and that she always used to leave a secret note buried in the house she was leaving. Giving the characters initials instead of names, as the cast list does, is, as usual, irritating in the sense that it implies they’re something more – or less – than individuals. That contradicts what the actors achieve here in their short time on screen together. (C and M don’t, of course, use the initials as a form of address – they, quite believably, don’t call each other anything.)
A scene of the couple in bed together, caressing one other before falling sleep, includes the first of several long takes in A Ghost Story. It’s also the best such take, conveying a warmth and intimacy between C and M that makes the death that follows more shocking and whose residue lasts throughout the film. Another long take comes in a hospital morgue. After M and a nurse have left, the camera stays on the corpse, now covered by a sheet, until C’s ghost sits up and rises from the trolley on which his body was lying. The impact of this is, if anything, reduced by the length of the shot. Even if the viewer isn’t already aware, through prior knowledge of the film, of what’s about to happen, s/he is naturally primed to expect something to happen: the longer the image on screen stays the same, the less surprising the change that eventually occurs. A long-take sequence that shows a woman – presumably a friend and/or neighbour – calling in at the house while M is out, writing a note and leaving it with a chocolate pie is puzzling. The woman (Liz Franke) doesn’t reappear. It’s hard to see what the real-time description of her visit brings to a dramatic film (as distinct from, say, an installation in an art gallery, which A Ghost Story occasionally suggests).
There may however be a whimsical explanation for that sequence – in the chocolate pie. Soon afterwards, this supplies the longest take of all, as M eats the entire pie and takes some nine minutes (nearly a tenth of the film’s total running time) to do so[1]. Rooney Mara’s conspicuous consumption made for some entertaining conversation in the Q&A – to everyone’s relief, Mara didn’t have to repeat the take – but it appears to show nothing that abbreviation would have missed. After not long at all, the scene is impressive only in its refusal to stop. Once you’ve seen this marathon sequence, you wonder if David Lowery wanted to anticipate it in the earlier one of the woman caller – as if warning us that the wretched pie itself has supernatural properties: the power, whenever it’s on screen, of transfixing the camera.
More problematic is the incoherence of the ghost’s existence though, from what he said in the Q&A and has been quoted as saying in interviews, this isn’t a problem for the writer-director. How well you get on with A Ghost Story depends a lot on how much you’re able and willing to suspend not so much disbelief as thought: David Lowery is banking on the audience accepting that, because this is a supernatural piece, anything goes. Although the film’s glacial pace and meditative ambience may be commercially heedless, Lowery isn’t above exploiting spooky screen conventions to suit his immediate purpose. Things go bump in the night while C and M are in bed and they get up to investigate. This is effective in fooling the viewer into expecting a more familiar haunted house film than the one Lowery delivers but he doesn’t subsequently explain the cause of the sounds. At one point, C’s ghost launches into traditional poltergeist behaviour – smashing plates and so on – but this spectacular outburst is a one-off. Here too, there’s an immediate impact, not least because the activity is witnessed by the two young children of the house’s new tenant (Sonia Acevedo), but what is its motivation? The Wikipedia plot synopsis explains that C is ‘deeply aggravated by boredom and loneliness one night’. He’d have much stronger grounds for such feelings in a later episode, when the house has different occupants, a party is taking place, and a character shown in the cast list as Prognosticator (Will Oldham) delivers a lengthy monologue about the futility of human existence and endeavour in a universe that is bound to die. (Some of this – the stuff about making art in the vain hope of achieving some sort of endurance – seems to be Lowery speaking for himself.) On this occasion, the poltergeist effects are relatively muted. The other guests must welcome the onset of flickering lights in the hope that they’re enough to shut the Prognosticator up but it’s a mystery why C doesn’t put on a bigger show: if post-mortem existence entails being stuck with windbags at parties it must be a fate worse than death. (Insult-to-injury bathos is in vogue this summer – witness the recent TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale. As if undergoing systematised sexual abuse in a theocratic dystopia wasn’t bad enough, the heroine also repeatedly had to play Scrabble.)
C isn’t fated to haunt the house – he chooses to be there. The ghost makes its way back from the hospital morgue and is seen approaching the house. We know that C felt an attachment to the place that M didn’t share; we nevertheless suppose that C’s reasons for returning to the house must include wanting to be ‘with’ M. Since his ghost can travel through space, why does it stay put after M has moved out – especially as C’s quest in the house appears to be to retrieve the note that M has left behind and secreted in a wall (and thereby achieve some kind of reconnection with her)? A question along those lines was put to David Lowery after the screening. In the course of the Q&A, we learned the following. Lowery has often become attached to houses where he’s lived. He loves the idea of time capsules. The disagreement between C and M about leaving the house was inspired by an actual argument between Lowery and his wife. His approach to writing the screenplay for A Ghost Story (which he completed unusually quickly for him) was ‘instinctive’. He found he couldn’t take the Rooney Mara character further, then reached the point where he could no longer move the ghost forward in time so had to go backwards instead. The contradictions and discontinuities of A Ghost Story, in other words, are meant to be ironed out and unified by the fact that they all express how Lowery’s mind was working as he wrote and directed the film. It’s not surprising that he says he’s more satisfied with this movie than with anything else he’s so far done (though he’s only thirty-six and this is only his third feature). It comes across as the personally meaningful picture he set out to make. It doesn’t, however, convey many meanings to the audience – unless they’ve read about Lowery’s intentions beforehand.
Years pass, occupants of the house come and go, C’s ghost remains on the premises. It’s clear by now that his attempts to recover M’s note – something which the ghost appears to be ‘physically’ capable of doing – will be inexplicably (and conveniently) intermittent. His latest attempt is interrupted by a bulldozer (the irrefutable demolition of the house has the unfortunate effect of realising the Prognosticator’s words). A multi-storey building materialises on the ground where C and M’s home once stood. On completion of the skyscraper, C’s ghost looks out from its top floor at the cityscape that has replaced the former green-belt. The ghost jumps off the edge of the building. After this ‘suicide’ it comes to on the same location in the nineteenth century – the prairie where a group of settlers are camped. A little girl among them writes on a piece of paper and hides it under a rock. She hums a tune that echoes music composed by C. The ghost hears in the distance the whoops of Native Americans and turns back to find the settler family slaughtered. He looks at the corpse of the little girl, which decomposes as the land around her changes. This kicks off a re-run of the entire history of the site, which culminates in C and M’s arrival at the house and their life together there. This doesn’t take long in screen time; you register the contrast between the rapid passage of the ages the ghost hangs around and the ‘eternity’ of the real-time, long-take descriptions of action during a few minutes. But you register it as a cinematic device – one that undermines any feeling that the ghost’s death sentence is painfully long-lasting. Similarly, the plunge from the skyscraper, as an isolated image, is compelling but it’s a highlight at odds with the film’s low-tech visual distinctiveness.
Lowery says the look of the protagonist was his starting point – that he’d wanted for some years to make a film with a white-sheeted ghost at its centre. He explained in the Q&A that this proved harder to achieve than he expected. Casey Affleck is hardly a physical giant but a king-sized sheet wasn’t enough to conceal him entirely; there was much more work for the costume designer (Annell Brodeur) than is obvious. The sheet conceals a helmet and layers of undergarments that were necessary in order to keep the eyeholes in place and for the outfit to drape satisfactorily. The ghost’s appearance occasionally calls to mind a hatless Klansman but otherwise has charm and magnetism, especially at first. The figure’s stillness – its inability to make its presence felt to M – is poignant as it watches her cry, play C’s music (written by Daniel Hart), even eat the chocolate pie. There’s a strong sense that it’s C’s ghost rather than M who is the more bereaved. Another ghost haunts the house opposite (with David Lowery under a floral-patterned sheet). The tweeness of subtitling the two wraiths’ signs to one other is largely overcome by what gets said between them – particularly when C’s ghost asks who the other ghost is waiting for and the reply is ‘I can’t remember’. The eventual collapse of both apparitions, leaving just a piece of fabric on the ground, is effective. The flowered sheet (containing the spirit of an old lady, according to Lowery in the Q&A) gives up the ghost when she decides whoever it is she’s waiting for isn’t going to come. C follows suit when he finally extracts M’s note from the wall and reads it. We don’t see what it says but we already knew the film would end at this point.
It’s not Rooney Mara’s fault that her role is underwritten but I wasn’t sure if it was intentional that her acting blurs the boundary between the living and the dead in the way it did for me. Mara is fine in the pre-mortem introduction but her grieving M has a marmoreal, sleepwalking quality. A Ghost Story marks Casey Affleck’s first appearance since Manchester by the Sea and can hardly fail to be of interest to anyone who admired his work in Kenneth Lonergan’s film as much as I did. In Lee Chandler, Affleck and Lonergan created the most memorable character in American cinema of the present decade (and, to my delighted surprise, were both rewarded with Oscars). You could say that A Ghost Story is the second consecutive Affleck film in which he’s played someone existing in an afterlife. On this occasion, though, it’s difficult to say how good he is – once he’s under the sheet. An actor can be eloquent on screen in spite of his face being invisible: John Hurt in part of The Elephant Man and Michael Fassbender in most of Frank are examples that come to mind. But Hurt and Fassbender could use the rest of their body and had lines to speak; Affleck isn’t allowed either of those opportunities. Anthony Lane in the New Yorker, who remarks how expressive Affleck is in A Ghost Story, may well be seeing things in his movement that I’m missing. I can’t help wondering, though, if the impression of expressiveness partly depends on unconsciously imagining Affleck’s face beneath his disguise. We know, from the few minutes he has in the film sans sheet how much Casey Affleck communicates when we can actually see him.
3 August 2017
[1] Online articles reveal a difference of opinion about the length of the sequence: some say it’s nine minutes, others that it’s only four. A possible explanation for this difference is that the shot changes halfway through. The scene certainly feels longer than four minutes.
