Mass

Not one of the quartet misses the opportunity to do some of their very best work here.

What fascinates the director, and clearly also fascinates his four outstanding lead actors, is the possibility of grace in a seemingly impossible, inconsolable situation. With considerable intelligence and disarming moral seriousness, they confront the question of whether forgiveness and understanding can be honestly extended or received, and whether healing can ever be more than an abstract concept.

Mass feels like a staged play brought to the cinema, with unobtrusive camerawork that gives us the feeling of eavesdropping on this intense and emotional and hopefully cathartic gathering.

A sad, poignant, dialogue-driven film destined for successful post-film life as a theatre production, writer/director Fran Kranz’s debut about two sets of parents on opposing sides of a tragedy locates the humanity in the seemingly endless, peculiarly American saga of school shootings. It also celebrates forgiveness.

The acting is uniformly great, as strong an ensemble performance as you’ll see. Franz’s direction is assured.

Mass, as maddening as it can be, still feels like an urgent and necessary movie, if not at all an easy one — and an exceptional opportunity too to watch four great character actors, finally called up from the sidelines to center stage, do what they do.

Actor-turned-filmmaker Fran Kranz’s choice of subject matter for his feature debut is certainly timely and provocative, but the emotions are too big and too messily human to fit into the tight box he has constructed to contain them.

Mass - it's raw pain like this that I've seen/felt before. It's an "actors movie" and I honestly forgot they were acting. Every tear, outburst, and voice crack felt and sounded real. And yes, I cried, a lot. Ann Dowd, Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, and Reed Birney were all out of this world. It's cold and haunting in its approach of filling in the gaps of events not shown on film for us the viewers. In a strange way, I found an element of the movie to be weirdly peaceful and safe. Four people in a room, sharing honestly about their thoughts and feelings, sharing stories, anger, tears, laughter, and filling in the blanks, but still walk away with closure, with no sense of emotional humiliation. It's not an easy movie, nor should it be. It's a movie that's painfully tragic on the cover, but beautifully alive in its spirit.

Mass is a special film that I've never seen anything like. Fran Kranz outdid himself in his directorial debut writing one of the best scripts of the year. He also got marvelous performances out of his actors with Jason Isaacs being the standout to me. The combination of the powerful writing and emotional performances makes this story heartbreaking to watch and impossible to forget. I was also very impressed with the cinematography and editing. For a one-room film with four people sitting around a table, there are numerous incredible shots where they show one character's reaction to something someone else is saying or they show two characters reacting to a comment in completely different ways. This is a marvelous movie about forgiveness and acceptance that is, in my opinion, essential viewing for anyone.

Mass is a 110-minutes long conversation, written well of course. And by the end we actually feel for the characters, it's like if we experienced what they experienced.

Two sets of parents (Reed Birney & Ann Dowd, Jason Isaacs & Martha Plimpton) meet to address the horrible tragedy that brought them together. The majority of this film features that quartet sitting around a table talking, albeit about a heavy subject. They certainly delve into the drama, delivering intense performances. First time director Fran Kranz has kept the camerawork simple, with the focus on the actors. There's an undeniable intelligence and sensitivity to the exchanges, which voice several sides of the issue. The intense atmosphere starts with their meeting and never subsides. Even though the words do, the production never builds to a dramatic release. Certainly, this deals with serious issues, but the lack of dynamics in the pace and the objective direction make this more a discussion of the affects on the parents and an opportunity for actors to go deep.

While I admire this attempt to portray the damage done by mass gun violence, particularly in schools, I don't see how this adds to the conversation. The parents' grief is of course heartbreaking, and the actors deliver. But there's nothing unexpected in the writing, no real insight regarding accountability for parenting gone horribly wrong OR the proliferation of guns. We don't need to "move on" from what's wrong with a culture where this happens, or even from the way it wrecks people's lives; we need to ask deeper questions than this writing asks, and figure out WHY it keeps happening. In that sense, words like "forgiveness" lose their meaning. I came away wondering what the word means here, beyond the usual religious usage, and it troubled me. It came off like a glossing over, far too neat, far too discouraging of a much-needed, insightful and deeper probe.