There have been many great movies made in the past few years, but nonethat I’ve seen reflects as comprehensive an act of creation as does “AGhost Story,” from the director and screenwriter David Lowery. It is asimple story of a house and its haunting: a young couple, played byRooney Mara and Casey Affleck, live in a small house in semi-ruralTexas. (Their characters are not named throughout the film; in the endcredits, the woman is called “M,” the man, “C.”) Early in the film, hedies in a car accident; after she observes the body in a hospitalmorgue, the young man rises in the form of a classic, nearly parodicghost—a white sheet with two eyeholes. He leaves the morgue, returns tothe house that he shared with the woman, and takes up residence there.This narrative hardly seems stocked with sufficient incidents to filleven a short film. But under the direction of Lowery, whose previousfilms include the historically resonant modern Western “Ain’t ThemBodies Saints” (which also starred Mara and Affleck) and the tender,tactile remake of “Pete’s Dragon,” “A Ghost Story” is a quietly grandromantic mystery, a metaphysical vision of love that is inseparable fromLowery’s wildly inventive yet controlled way with the very stuff ofmovies: movement, performance, space, time, light, color, reflections,effects, talk, sound, and, for that matter, silence. The film, whichpulls an epigram from Virginia Woolf’s story “A Haunted House,” is ajewel-like novella written directly onto the screen in images.
“A Ghost Story” ’s fiercely audacious originality is on view from thestart, before any ghosts make their appearance. When C and M sittogether, yet apart, in the sparely furnished living room, each using alaptop computer, Lowery uses the simplest of devices—focus, keeping Csharply in the foreground and M in the background—to suggest thedistance of intimacy, a vague self-absorption that will, of course,eventually become clearer. Soon it’s apparent that a change is about tohappen, because M is doing a major cleaning, which Lowery captures in asingle ingeniously conceived and deftly realized image: a tilt of thecamera down from the sky to a house sitting on a broad swath of unkemptgrass. The camera tracks horizontally as M drags a chest laboriouslyfrom the front door of a small one-story house, toward the camera, as itpasses at a tightly measured lateral glide from one side of the barepath to the other; she deposits it curbside with a pile of othergarbage, and the camera then reverses course. The simple movement of theimage along with that of the woman is “unmotivated,” which is to saythat it’s not done to follow her movement, to emphasize her particulargesture, or to reveal any additional narrative details. It makes themoment feel as if it has its own distinctive identity and, moreover,makes each of the elements of an apparently unified frame burst forth inits own disparate identity.
The multiplicity of elements in a single frame—the seeming miracle ofthings being together in the same time and place—is one of Lowery’sdecisive visual themes. When the couple is together in bed at night, aseeming slam of the strings of the pair’s upright piano by an invisiblevisitor leads to a twilight prowl that Lowery again controls withprecise focus and delicate shadow. When they return to bed, the resultis an exaltedly intimate nuzzle in a single shot that has a tightropewalker’s tensely thrilling uninterrupted duration. (Lowery’s control oftime throughout the film is exquisite.) The interruption comes withanother image, in daytime, of the front of the house; Lowery pans veryslowly from it toward the street, where two cars sit silently, havingcatastrophically crashed; one of them contains C, who is dead. After Mgoes to the morgue to observe the body and leaves, the sheetrises with a jolt and then makes its way, seemingly invisible, throughthe hospital. The ghost passes in silence through vast fields andeventually reaches the house. Existing in an alternate realm of time,the ghost also has a tempo of its own, a phlegmatic, nearly shuffle-likeglide that seems to temper the tempo of the entire movie—as if the movie itself were haunted, inhabited by this practical,ever-so-slightly yet overwhelmingly comical, silent ghost, who’sinvisible and inaudible to the living.
That’s where the pie comes in. A real-estate agent named Linda (LizCardenas Franke) comes into the house, under the ghost’s watchful gaze;she leaves a pie for M, along with a note about showing the house, andshe leaves. In a cut, M arrives and finds the pie; she begins to eat itwhile standing at the table—and finishes almost the entire pie whilesitting on the kitchen floor, and then dashes to the bathroom to throwit up, all while being watched by the ghost, who’s there in the frame alongwith M but invisible to her. The scene has become the object of absurdcritical quibbles andcomplaintsthat suggest, above all, the narrow range of directorial creations andthe limited sense of imagination to which many critics have becomeconditioned.
Yes, M—which is to say Mara herself—eats nearly a whole pie in the spanof two shots that run for about five minutes. And, yes, there’s both apsychological simplicity and a psychological vagueness to the action,suggesting both that grief is mind-bending and that people are weird.(Many critics seem to expect action to be mapped with a screenwriter’sindex-card facility onto specific character traits.) But M’sincreasingly frenzied pie-eating is far from the only thing that’s goingon in the scene. There are M’s small gestures as she stands at thekitchen sink, opens the garbage can, goes through the mail. There is thechanging afternoon light on the kitchen wall. And, as she digs withincreasing vehemence at the pie, there is the ghost standing in thebackground, looking impassively at the woman he loves, whose sufferinghe has caused but whom he is unable to comfort. Though the action is ofa one-line-screenplay simplicity, the images seem alive with theimpingement of a world of nature and personal connections, of impulsesand memories, in a single, pain-streaked but nearly comedic astonishment(Lowery’s alertness to the ordinary sounds that embody the existentialweight of the gestures of daily life—the little noises M makes as sheopens the foil, the sound of the fork clicking against the bottom of theglass plate—is surpassed only by that of Robert Bresson.)
The romantic mystery and supernatural wonder of “A Ghost Story” emergesfrom careful observation matched by freewheeling speculation; themovie’s dramatic power is inseparable from its hushed, sensuoussplendor. There are heart-stopping moments of near-contact between M andthe ghost of C, intricate reflections that render the ghost’sinvisibility all the more poignant, flashbacks and recurrences that echowith the touch of the uncanny. One of Lowery’s grandest creations is theghost-C’s silent conversations, in subtitles, with the ghost next door,which reveal that the fundamental role of ghosts is to wait—to returnhome and wait—as if making the impossible demand that the living do thesame. A ghost is a diminished thing, both invisible and, seemingly,dulled and narrowed, enduring solely to see the lover left behind; thehorror of a house’s haunting is ghostly wrath at a sense of abandonmentby a lover who dares to move on, ghostly envy of happy people, ghostlyresentment of newcomers who usurp the sacred space of lost love. Ghostsin the film, who take the age-old form of children’s-costume ghosts, arelike overgrown children, reduced to primal emotion. Their sense of place,their attachment to the site of their former home, has an obstinate,childlike earnestness—hence the harrowed, perturbed, and fragileinnocence of the ghostly gaze, which Lowery brings out in imagescapturing the slow, determined, frozen gestures of the ghost of C(Affleck under the sheet).
Lowery daringly advances time throughout the film in cuts (he edited thefilm, too), and the leaps ahead in time are matched by audacious shiftsin space (ones too good to spoil), by way of architecture and urbanism,leading the ghost to contemplate a modern office tower in various stagesof construction as well as the spectacle of city life that’s on viewfrom its heights. (There’s also a daring and historically informed leapback in time, provoking a spiral of time that’s also too delicious tospoil; suffice it to say that afterlives connect joltingly withpre-lives.) After the ghost C chases a happy family out of the housewhere he’s awaiting M’s return, other people take their place: apparentart-world adults who hold a party at which a barroom philosopher (playedby Will Oldham) delivers an extended, bombastic monologue about thefutility of creation in the face of the ultimate destruction of theuniverse. The ghost’s silent contemplation (and dramatic response) and,for that matter, the entire film itself, is a refutation of that materialistpoint of view. “A Ghost Story” provides its own supreme and cosmicjustification: what Lowery films, with his rarefied fusion of style andsubject, is the existence of the soul.
