Ghost Story, A (2017) [Blu-ray]
Drama | Fantasy | Romance
Tagline: It's all about time.
With A Ghost Story, acclaimed director David Lowery (Ain't them Bodies Saints, Pete's Dragon) returns with a singular exploration of legacy, loss, and the essential human longing for meaning and connection. Recently deceased, a
white-sheeted ghost (Academy Award-winner Casey Affleck) returns to his suburban home to console his bereft wife (Academy Award-nominee Rooney Mara), only to find that in his spectral state he has become unstuck in time, forced to watch passively as the
life he knew and the woman he loves slowly slip away. Increasingly unmoored, the ghost embarks on a cosmic journey through memory and history, confronting life's ineffable questions and the enormity of existence. An unforgettable meditation on love and
grief, A Ghost Story emerges ecstatic and surreal - a wholly unique experience that lingers long after the credits roll.
Storyline: Resonating with vibrant memories and silent echoes of a shared life, the old house is somehow connected to "C", a sensitive composer who is hesitant of leaving it, while his loving wife "M", on the other hand, is keen
on moving out, having an indecipherable but grim premonition of danger. Sadly, disaster soon strikes, and C's untethered spectre which detaches from the lifeless body, rises from the mortician's table, and in a swift decision, decides to linger in this
dimension to faithfully follow the grieving M back to the old house. As silent as a shadow and as invisible as the air, C's unappeasable phantom observes M's denial and depression gradually turn to acceptance and even hope, as time unravels, moving
forward through the decades. In this earth, man struggles to leave his legacy behind. Is this the way to immortality? Written by Nick Riganas
Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, September 30, 2017 Note: Guess what? A Ghost Story has a ghost in it! If you don't want even a hint of whose ghost it is, I'd suggest skipping the main body of
the review and dropping down to the technical portions, below.
With Halloween more or less right around the corner, there's the opportunity to completely confound some kids who may have taken the lo-fi route with regard to costumes and just thrown a sheet with eye holes over themselves. "Oh, look, you're Casey
Affleck!" you might be tempted to say, at least if you're a curmudgeonly type who likes to make perhaps obscure cinematic references. A Ghost Story has a rather interesting story to tell, one that deals with love, loss, time and memory, but it also
exploits a curious and perhaps fatal (no pun intended, given the film's context) conceit with regard to the spectral entity portrayed by Affleck for the bulk of the film. In one of the supplements included on this Blu-ray, writer and director David Lowery
mentions how he had long wanted to make a film about a ghost using only a sheet over the designated actor to indicate that the perform was indeed depicting a spirit. Even Lowery states he found the idea funny, and my hunch is many viewers will as well,
and it's that perhaps inherently comic aspect that seems tonally at odds with a film that is otherwise virtually drenched in melancholy. Certain unexplained aspects also figure into a story that tends to resonate emotionally but which (perhaps like ghosts
themselves) defies logic at times. A Ghost Story has received a lot of critical acclaim, but (from my experience, anyway) it's split audiences more decisively, with some folks I know who have seen it calling it an inarguable masterpiece and other
folks I know who have seen it calling it one of the most supreme bores they've watched recently. Again, my hunch on how some viewers will respond to A Ghost Story may hinge in great part on how they react to the sight of a grown man traipsing
around in a bedsheet for an hour and half.
It's perhaps indicative of a certain distance from the focal characters that they're only "named" C (Casey Affleck) and M (Rooney Mara). In just one of what I found to be somewhat baffling plot points, M is talking about having had to move from home to
home, evidently because of repeated hauntings, though how this particular "confession" fits into the film's overall timeline is a little squishy. The fact that this particular allusion is left largely unexplored, as the film veers off into a haunting of
the house C and M currently share, perhaps reveals a certain looseness in narrative structure that Lowery continues to employ in a film that can probably only loosely itself be considered horror. This narrative technique is deliberately
disjunctive, twisting time back on itself once one of the two main characters ends up dead and becomes the titular spirit. This particular "transformation" is a prime example of how Lowery approaches telling the story, in a sequence some may find
fascinating, and other may find either unintentionally or maybe intentionally hilarious. The corpse is covered with a sheet in a hospital morgue and then the camera just stays on it for a good, long while until the body rises up underneath it.
That looseness requires a certain tolerance on the part of the audience to get to what is the film's best aspect, its rumination on the passage of time and the persistence of memory. Some of the conceits employed, as in a sudden shift to the wild west,
are iffy at best and lunatic at worst, but every conceit in this intellectually interesting film pales in comparison to its central one, and for that I refer you to some of the screenshots accompanying this review. How do you feel about a
"character" who's a bedsheet with two Kean sized black eyes, especially when said character is wandering through vast outdoor vistas? I have to confess I just found it all giggle worthy, and therefore couldn't make it through some of the supposedly
emotionally wrenching bits without kind of laughing under my breath. Those with a different kind of tolerance than I evidently have, with regard to this particular presentational aspect, might therefore resonate more strongly with what are actually some
rather fascinating ideas that Lowery seems to want to explore. In other words, I feel like perhaps more than many other films, A Ghost Story is going to be one of those "your mileage may vary" options based almost entirely on how you feel about a
guy in a sheet.
Some of you may have seen the superb Ingmar Bergman parody The Dove (De Düva) which has laugh out loud vignettes based on some of the master director's best known films. There was a curiously similar feeling wafting through A Ghost Story for
me, and it made me wonder if the film would have played better as a pitch black comedy. In fact, there are some whose jaded sensibilities may appreciate the film as a comedy, especially given the incredibly earnest performances of Affleck (in the
non-sheet bits, anyway) and Mara. The comedic highlight of the film for some may be when this particular ghost discovers another spirit living (?) next door, who has a patterned sheet, just so you can tell the difference.
Note: My colleague Brian Orndorf perhaps liked A Ghost Story a bit more than I did. With a warning that Brian reveals whose ghost it is as well, you can read his thoughts here.
Here's the thing with A Ghost Story for me: Lowery already provides a really cool visual referent for a spirit in the film's very opening scene, when C glimpses the spectral rainbow climbing up the wall. For me, anyway, the film would have been so
much more effective if he had continued to use that glyph as the symbol for the ghost, which could have artfully been woven with point of view shots to clearly depict what was going on. Having someone stumbling around in a sheet is almost unavoidably
funny, at least to jaded folks like me, and it instantly distanced me from the film's underlying melancholy. Those more tolerant of the film's central visual conceit may well find this a thought provoking exercise that doesn't have the comedic baggage it
might for others, though even those folks may have occasional questions about Lowery's more "arty" proclivities. Technical merits are generally strong, and with caveats duly noted, A Ghost Story comes Recommended.
[CSW] -2.3- This reviewer said it better than I could (*Spoiler Alert*): This is a story of a ghost who mostly stands in a house over hundreds of years and watches various people move in, move out, love, argue, cry, play, and talk. He doesn't
even haunt anyone, except for a Latino family (our protagonist seems to be a racist). My biggest problem is that there simply isn't much to this film. I get that the languid takes and repetitive scenes are supposed to represent the ghost's interminable
time spent in the house, but I don't need to watch paint dry in order to understand the process. It's a story that could have been handled in a short film, or actually just a three minute long music video, with very little of its message of love, loss,
and our temporal existence missing.
.
[V4.0-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box
º º