Mass: Intense Drama Explores Horrors of School Shootings Through Parental Lens
By Kim Hughes
Rating: B+
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.
Mass opens in a small-town church and community centre where a harried parishioner is scrambling to set up a room for that day’s main event: a meeting between the parents of a boy killed in a mass school shooting and the parents of his shooter.
Some time has passed since the horrible event took place — established through references to letters sent, legal documents filed, media statements made — but the pain remains raw, especially for Jay and Gail (Jason Isaacs and Martha Plimpton), whose teenage son Evan was one of those murdered by Hayden, the son of Richard and Linda (Reed Birney and Ann Dowd) in a fictional incident inspired by the headlines.
The parents sit across from each other at a table, and the talking tentatively begins. Pleasantries dissolve into queries which mutate into probing questions which erupt, as they must, into accusations, screams, and howls, with the viewer heaved into depths of uncomfortableness and sorrow by these extraordinary performances.
As the story moves forward, the two boys’ lives are teased out and they become almost as real as the characters speaking in the room. Almost. Dowd’s Linda is a huggable Earth Mother, a New Age optimist who, like her husband Richard, sensed early on that something was amiss with their son, but couldn’t quite overcome it, and is clearly shattered.
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By contrast, Richard is steely, a brittle pragmatist battling against the storm of incoming grief. His and Linda’s skewed parenting style becomes apparent as they talk more, but then, what parenting style isn’t skewed? Jay and Gail, meanwhile, are desperate to unearth meaning from the senselessness of the act that claimed their son. In the end, nobody gets what they came looking for, but everyone leaves with something arguably more meaningful.
In press notes, writer/director Kranz says the idea for this story was built equally on his own experience with school shootings — he was an outcast teenager when Columbine happened in 1999 and a brand-new father during Parkland in 2018 — as well as the work of South Africa’s post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Committee, which Kranz studied in college. From the fraught, seemingly impassable terrain between calamity and mercy, Mass emerged.
Mass is an intense and emotionally draining film, a potential bookend to We Need to Talk About Kevin even as its unique execution recalls Carnage, minus the laughs. It may be too grand a claim to say the film recalibrates our response to school shootings. But it does a superb job of capturing deep, wrenching grief and then, crucial, life-saving redemption.
CLICK HERE to see Bonnie Laufer’s video interview with writer-director Franz Krans.
Mass. Written and directed by Fran Kranz. Starring Ann Dowd, Jason Isaacs, Martha Plimpton, and Reed Birney. In theatres October 15.