David Lowery's 2017 film, A Ghost Story, is a minimalist exercise in sleek, hihilistic post-modern style. The film is shallow, but knows that it is shallow and, therefore, excuses its shallowness by putting post-modern quotes around it. The hyper-intelligent and aware film makers probably wouldn't disagree with this characterization. However, one could substitute for "shallow" the word "trite" -- I presume this would be anathema to them. At heart, the movie has one trick, but it's a good one: what if the spirits of the dead, in fact, manifested as elegant figures in white sheets with black elliptical eyes cut in the fabric that are wholly inexpressive -- indeed, nothing more than deep and dark shadows? This is where the distinction between "shallow" and "trite" arises. Certainly, it is self-consciously "shallow" to conceive of a ghost as a spook parading around like a 7 year-old under a sheet -- however,it is also precociously clever, maybe even brilliant, to devise a movie around this concept. Casey Affleck, the leading man, is a famous Hollywood heart-throb -- so, the mischievous film maker says: "Let's cover him up in a sheet that shows not one inch of his skin and have him traipse around in the movie in that get-up." It's a sort of Dadaist joke and, in fact, the marmoreal ghost gliding about in his elegant drapery of white cloth, catching on its edges the ambient textures and colors of light, is an extremely beautiful apparition. But where do we go from here?
A young couple lives in a unprepossessing house that seems to be out on the pampas somewhere. (It turns out that the house was a real place in suburban Dallas.) The house is rented and the young woman wishes to move somewhere more urban and elegant -- the place is indisputably ramshackle. But the husband is inexplicably attached to the house (because, as it turns out, his ghost is haunting the place.) One night that couple hear the piano in the other room sound as if someone has touched the keys. They get up and look around but there is no one. The next morning, the young man (he seems to be a musician specializing in spooky tunes) gets himself killed in a pre-dawn crash right outside the home. At the morgue, he gets up wearing his sheet and walks back home. Then, he sits around the house moping. He observes his wife grieving and throws a tantrum when a year later she brings a man home. (No one can see him but he can make electric lights flare and can move objects around.) His wife leaves the home after depositing an enigmatic slip of paper in a crack in the wall which she paints over. The ghost finds that there is another similarly sheeted specter in an adjacent home: this poor ghost is waiting for "someone to return" but can't recall who it is. A Hispanic woman and her three children move into the house. The ghost is apparently racist or bigoted because he throws a poltergeist fit smashing the family's crockery. (This seems just mean-spirited.) The ghost seems to like the next tenants (who are white people) much more -- these apparently are college kids or professors, hipsters of some sort who host a party in the home. The party climaxes in an 18 minute monologue by one professorial type on an ancient theme: the vanity of human desire and achievement in the face of an eternity of indifferent time. After the party, the house is condemned but the ghost still sulks there, scratching at the wall to try to retrieve his wife's note pushed into the crack -- but the sheet of paper eludes him. A wrecking ball knocks the house down and, later, a skyscraper is built on the site. The ghost morosely parades around the corridors of the building and, then, looks out over a great neon-bright city built in the area. Then, the ghost goes back in time. Pioneers arrive on the empty pampas and try to build a house, but Indians slaughter them. The ghost morosely observes a young girl elegantly decomposing in the grass, an arrow stuck in her belly. Then, the married couple arrive, time looping it seems, the ghost watches them quarrel. A second ghost appears, presumably, another version of the husband because now the woman is alone -- the accident has happened. (This leads to an amusing surmise -- if this loop continues, the house will soon be packed full of mournful, silent, inexpressive ghosts). This second ghost is more vigorous than the first and he manages to get the Rosebud-like note out of the wall. When he opens it to read the message, suddenly, he deflates and his sheet (in fact, both sheets because there are two ghosts) falls empty to the floor. (There are aspects of the film that reflect casual reference of the Tibetan Book of the Dead -- in the hospital, the ghost approaches a threshold blazing with different colors of light, but doesn't enter there and wanders off to the house that he has been apparently haunting for all eternity. The composer had a chorus chanting Bardo Thole at various points in the movie -- the chant can be heard in a couple scenes if you listen closely.)
This plot is filmed with exacting attention to light and color -- we can almost always determine the exact time of day. There is next to no acting. The young couple seems selfish and disaffected and scarcely talk to one another while the husband is alive. The husband's death is absorbed by the young woman in one completely vacant and expressionless close-up in the morgue -- in fact, in a strange way, the be-sheeted ghost is more expressive than the actors. The film is shallow in many respects: it's certainly trite to show the widow's grief in terms of her eating an entire pie and, then, vomiting (none too persuasively) -- this is all done in one four or five minute shot that is made in low light and intentionally inexpressive. The style sometimes resembles Bresson but a moronic version of that film maker's deliberately inexpressive style. It's as if the extremely laid-back filmmakers were too lazy or hip to script any sort of expressions of grief (or simply didn't know how to do this). Showing the grieving woman scarfing down a pie certainly seems to me to be a trite expression of grief and a sort of cheat. And the film makers are obviously blind to the implications of their imagery -- showing an angry spook in a sheet menacing a Hispanic family in the suburbs of Dallas certainly has connotations of which the terminally hip film makers seem to have been wholly unaware. Isn't the sheet associated with the Ku Klux Klan? Why does the ghost only attack the Hispanic family? The long monologue that is supposed to explain the movie is also trite, although well enough scripted and delivered in an interesting way. And the film's Ku Klux Klan aspect seems also reflected in the gratuitous Indian attack, devised I think by the clueless hyper-white film makers as a way to import a clever and arresting special effects stunt into the movie -- the decomposition of the little girl as the ghost sulks next to her. There are aspects of the movie that work reasonably well and, in fact, the film has some "bump scares" that are genuinely unsettling. Some cosmic night skies are attractively shot and the extremely nuanced camerawork is beautiful to behold somewhat in the style of Terence Malick's The Tree of Life, but the movie is, more or less, a fraud and a cheat.
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