BEFORE: The genre confusion continues tonight, because the IMDB classifies this film as both a mystery, a drama, a supernatural fantasy, and a romance. Notice that "horror" is absent from the list. So I've been debating for a while over where this one should go - according to my system, something needs to be either a romance OR a horror film, it just can't be both, because one thing would mean it gets watched in February, and the other thing suggests October. OK, umm, which list does this belong on? Essentially it's about ghosts, so therefore October, once the linking finally allows it, which is NOW. OK, so problem solved?
Jonny Mars carries over from "I Lost My Body". Well, whatever happens, I got where I wanted to go, this film was scheduled for tomorrow, and I worked hard to get ahead of the count so I can review and post TODAY, as we're leaving tomorrow for North Carolina, and I'm going to be away from my computer for a week. Now I've got a shot at finishing the horror chain once we get back - then I'll start the REAL countdown to Halloween.
THE PLOT: An exploration of legacy, love, loss, and the enormity of existence. A recently deceased, white-sheeted ghost returns to his suburban home to try to reconnect with his bereft wife.
AFTER: Well, I guess this is as good a place as any to take a week's break, with a film that explores life, death, loss, regret, love and umm, whatever the opposite of love is, be it dissatisfaction or burgeoning dislike or plain old disappointment. Damn, if only we had a word for the opposite of love - I know that you might THINK we do, but we don't. It's not "hate", no, that would be too simple and also untrue, because you can both love and hate something, you can't stop and go at the same time, you can't work and play at the same time either, to be opposites one has to preclude the other, and love and hate just don't work that way. Love and hate are a bit more like eating and drinking, you're probably going to end up doing both at the same time, at least to some small degree.
But I didn't really know what to do with this film because of the way it depicts ghosts, here they are seen as actors wearing sheets, with eye-holes cut out, and that calls to mind comic strips and cartoons, one example would be "It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown" where we see a couple of characters from the "Peanuts" gang in ghost costumes, which are just sheets with those eye-holes so they can walk around. It's a trope, an over-simplification, like when you see a stick of dynamite in a cartoon it's a red cylinder with a fuse and the letters TNT on the side - in real life not all explosives look like that. But when we see that in a cartoon, we know what it represents, just as if you picture a candy bar or a toy train in your head, it's likely to be a cartoony or comic-like image. Can I really take a film seriously that depicts human souls as cartoonish ghosts, just people wearing big sheets? Is this aimed at an audience of ten-year-olds?
I think maybe this is just a convention, a means to an end, somebody needed a way to cause the dead characters to immediately register as "ghosts" in our minds, to separate them from the still-living characters, and not be gross like depicting them as rotting corpses. If I think about other movies with ghosts in them, like the movie "Ghost", Patrick Swayze's character died and they just kept depicting him as the way he looked when he was alive, isn't that just as ridiculous, if you stop and think about it? While in "The Haunted Mansion" some ghosts looked like they did when they were alive, only see-through, and others took on more demonic appearances - really, there are no right answers here, just different filmic conventions used for the sake of clarity, in trying to prove a larger point. How should a vampire look in a movie, how should a zombie or a werewolf look? Really, it all comes down to art direction - "Dracula" set the standard for how a vampire should look, and everyone just fell in line, but other answers later became possible.
So this brings us back to the main question, and it's the million-dollar question: What happens to us when we die? If what's represented here isn't it, then...what is it? If we're a ghost or spirit and we're not just wearing a sheet, what would we look like, or would we even be visible? Is there a chance to move on to another plane that we can opt out of, because we have unfinished business? Or is the answer the simplest one of all, that we die and then - nothing happens, we just cease to exist? I was walking through Manhattan yesterday and I saw what used to be a bunch of weed stores, they all popped up around the same time two or three years ago, and now they're all going out of business around the same time, which is weird because pot seemed like really popular for a while, what happened? Or did the legit stores stay and the phony ones or the ones without licenses all fail? It doesn't matter, because I think people are a bit like weed stores or closed restaurants, the demise is a certainty, we just don't know when that store is going to close, but come on, we know it's going to close eventually. And so you walk by your former favorite restaurant or an old weed store and it's like seeing a dead body, you know what it once WAS, but it's not in business any more, you're just looking at the shell. But we don't say the business is in heaven, we just say it doesn't exist any more. So easy answer, if you see a dead body, you're just looking at the shell of who it once was, but the person is gone, they just no longer exist. See, is that so hard? We don't want to face the truth because it reminds us of our own inevitable demise, that one day we also won't exist, so we say they "passed on" or their spirit is "all around us", even if you don't follow a religion it can be hard to admit they're gone.
The story here is that the husband's ghost sticks around, but he can't talk to his wife, he can't tell her he's a ghost, he just wants to be near her because of either love or maybe just habit. But clearly they argued a lot, we see a little bit of this at the start of the film and a lot more during the flashbacks at the end, so was it really the perfect relationship, or was he too controlling or not communicative enough, or a little bit of both? If he hadn't died in a car crash very close to their house, who's to say how long the relationship would have lasted beyond that point? His ghost rises up from the viewing slab in the morgue after they cover him with a sheet (very convenient, this becomes his ghost "costume"...) and he makes his way out of the hospital and walks back home, where he watches his wife grieve him, then get back into a routine, and at some point in the near future, she sells the house (which, it turns out, she was never really sold on in the first place, even though it came with a piano). But before she leaves to drive off following the U-Haul van with her belongings, she leaves a note inside a crack in a wall's molding.
"C", the ghost, becomes obsessed with trying to get that note out of the wall, though as a ghost it's kind of hard for him to move objects. He watches as a new family buys the house, a single mother and two kids, and maybe the kids can see him? It's unclear. But he essentially haunts them, and it's a bit odd that he can't get that note out of the wall crack but he has no trouble throwing this family's plates around to convince them that their house is haunted. They flee, or move out slowly, it's tough to say, but "C" then moves forward in time to a new set of residents, it looks like a bunch of hipsters who throw wild parties and also discuss the secrets of the universe while they're high. Maybe somewhere in there we get the director's view on how the universe really works, but I've got to say, it's a downer, one guy likes to talk about how our sun is going to turn into a red giant someday and destroy the earth, but it doesn't matter because by then the human race will either be living on other planets (if we get our shit together) or dead from climate change or natural disasters. OK, this guy I like, but he totally forgot about the massive black hole at the center of our galaxy which is symbolically and literally the drain that our solar system is circling.
"C" also makes friends (?) with the ghost that lives in the house next door, who is waiting for somebody, and always waiting and watching for that somebody. This jibes with the theory that ghosts are just dead spirits with unresolved issues, and they can't move on to the next plane of existence until that matter is settled. That person may never be coming back, but the ghost can't quite grasp that, because it's dead and has a very limited brain capacity, well no brain at all. More time passes and the houses all get torn down and somebody builds an industrial park, so "C" haunts some kind of corporate office for a while, but you know, it's just not the same, he really liked that house.
But free of the constraint of wondering what was on that note in a house that got torn down, "C" is free to wander the earth, but instead decides to jump off of a tall building. This somehow sends him through the timestream, and he gets to watch as a group of pioneers settle on the land that would one day become his house (this is a lot like "Here" in some ways) and also he gets to see them killed by Native Americans. NITPICK POINT: If this is how ghosts work, why don't THEIR spirits haunt this land? Clearly they had unresolved issues, they moved across the country in a covered wagon to own a piece of a new state, and they never got to enjoy it!
"C" then moves forward in time, somehow, and ends up being a ghost in his own house, while he and his wife were living there. This explains a few things that happened in the earlier parts of the film, pre-car crash, but there's no getting over how creepy this is that he's spying on his OWN relationship, and this time he knows it's doomed to fail, and he knows how and when he's going to die, and I don't know, is this supposed to be some weird take on life being some big awkward circle or something? The good news is that he gets one more chance to get that note out of the crack in the molding...
And the other good news is that I have a new answer in case anyone asks me what happens when we die. My new answer is that when we die, friends and neighbors bring over pies and casseroles and somebody sells your collection of things. Can we all agree this is the case? There may or may not be an after-life, but let's at least make sure there's an after-party, even if we can't make it because we're dead.
Directed by David Lowery (director of "Peter Pan & Wendy" and "The Green Knight")
Also starring Casey Affleck (last seen in "Oppenheimer"), Rooney Mara (last seen in "Women Talking"), Kenneisha Thompson (last seen in "The Old Man & the Gun"), Barlow Jacobs (ditto), Liz Cardenas Franke (last seen in "The Wolf of Snow Hollow"), Sonia Acevedo, Carlos Bermudez, Yasmina Violeta Gutierrez, Kesha Sebert, Jared Kopf, Will Oldham (last seen in "The Bikeriders"), Brea Grant (last seen in "Fanarchy"), Augustine Frizzell (last seen in "Ain't Them Bodies Saints"), Rob Zabrecky, Sara Tomerlin, McColm Cephas Jr. (last seen in "Ambulance"), Grover Coulson (last seen in "The Lone Ranger"), Richard Krause, Dagger Salazar, Kimberly Fiddes, Daniel Escudero, Afomia Hailemeskel, Rachel Ballard, Bryan Pitts, David Lowery,
RATING: 5 out of 10 card tricks
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