Richard has his prickly defenses about the care and attention Hayden received before it all went wrong, while Linda is more willing to explore the gray areas of Hayden’s character. Their tentative interaction maneuvers between confrontation and shared lament, staged as one long, almost real-time conversation as this shattered quartet tries to reach an ineffable understanding.Īs the parents of the boy, Hayden, who killed 9 classmates and one teacher before turning his gun on himself, Dowd and Birney embody different but complementary ideas of how such a thing might be processed. They are, after much official mediation, meeting with the parents, Gail ( Martha Plimpton) and Jay ( Jason Isaacs), of one of those killed. The tricky conceit of the film is that one pair of parents-Linda ( Ann Dowd) and Richard ( Reed Birney)-raised the boy who did the shooting. Kranz’s writing, and the generous performances of his actors, tend toward grace and compassion the film directly, urgently grapples with what may be salvable while gently giving space to what isn’t. ![]() Mass exists in the long tail of grief and in the persistent haunt of questions unanswered, and perhaps unanswerable. Or does it? That is, in some ways, the investigation of the film, which is about two sets of parents trying to sift through what happened, years after it did. The film, from writer-director Fran Kranz, concerns a school shooting, one of those all too common horrors that arrives entirely without warning. In film form, Mass can potentially reach a wider swath of people than a play probably ever would, especially in parts of this country where it is perhaps most grimly relatable. Which, ultimately, may be a good thing, if it can find an audience. But it’s not a play: It’s a film vying for national attention amid the clamor of James Bond and other large scale amusements. ![]() Or, at least, it would have caught the eye of many culture vultures in search of bracingly intimate, and pertinent, theater. Were the new film Mass (in limited theaters October 8) an off-Broadway play, something as searing and finely performed as it is would likely have become a mini sensation.
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