‘Mass’ depicts the powerlessness of parents after a school shooting

Six years after a bomb attack and shooting at an American school, two couples of relatives meet in a side room of a church. Jay (Jason Isaacs) and Gail (Martha Plimpton) are the parents of one of the victims, Richard (Reed Birney) and Linda (Ann Dowd) are parents of the perpetrator, who shot and killed ten people and then committed suicide.

The sublimely acted chamber gamemovie Mass is in a sense as concise as described above. There are no flashbacks to the drama and the film is set almost entirely in that one room, where a searching conversation unfolds about the meaning of forgiveness and repentance, parental intuition and responsibility.

At the most it is striking how carefully debuting director and screenwriter Fran Kranz shrouds the nature of the meeting during the first scenes, so that the massacre to be discussed is presented almost as a plot twist. It is a remarkable artifice, perhaps used to reinforce the feeling that all relatives are victims, in a narrative that otherwise proceeds naturally and intuitively.

After a career spanning two decades as a Hollywood actor (The Village† The Cabin in the Woods) Kranz knows how to make a collection of actors completely disappear into their roles. The clumsy attempts with which the conversation is opened, the sliding around of a flower arrangement brought along, a hastily chosen political side path: they are the cleverly conceivable start for a deep dive into the unimaginable. Gus Van Sants echoes the way in which numerous potential explanations pass in review without actually explaining anything drama Elephant (2004), which is also about a school shooting. A move during puberty, bullying in seventh grade, an incident of violence that the parents hoped would remain an incident; also in Mass they are now clichés, attempts to make connections between isolated or not isolated facts, while the next of kin have little more than acceptance of powerlessness.

Beautiful is also how Mass despite its minimalist design, it never looks like a play made for a film. Notice how the camera moves slowly from one couple to another, with no one in the picture halfway through the table: that space is perhaps what matters most here, the place where so many words linger in frustration and incomprehension. It betrays great mastery of the film profession not to get bogged down in an overly obvious depiction of such a weighty conversation.

A debutant who makes it so difficult for himself and then succeeds in so many areas has a great future ahead of him.