A Maybe Once In A Decade Masterpiece
See It Or Skip It: See It
Actions are an interesting thing. Sometimes if you take action, you may achieve something worthwhile while other actions in it of themselves can lead to demolition. Doing nothing is an action in its own essence and sometimes, all you're left with is everything that comes after. I always prefer to know what I’m seeing before watching any film. Films like Mass are rare and by rare, I mean once every DECADE, MAYBE you’ll find yourself in the presence of such a film. Only, if a director is forthcoming enough to break the social boundaries of all psychological censorship and let people talk when, how, and if they’re ready.
Fran Kranz is such a director and his directorial debut Mass which he also wrote is such a film. Mass doesn’t breathe but it doesn’t suffocate. Mass simply uses anesthesia on its viewers. To watch it is literally like going into surgery. Mass opens and you feel like you're arriving at the hospital, checking in and going over some details with the surgeon one final time and you're left in one little room and that’s where you are for most of the film. The final 15 minutes of the film outside the little room make viewers feel like they're waking up from surgery. You feel groggy and disoriented because of the anesthesia and because there’s been so much work done and my god do the 4 characters in Mass perform such a cinematic surgery.
Two married couples, Jay and Gail (Jason Issacs & Martha Plimpton) and Richard and Linda (Richard Birney & Ann Dowd) agree to meet and talk. The location is a wide empty room in a church basement where most of the film takes place. The conversation that unfolds between the 4 is executed by the best performances you’ll see from 2021.
Ann Dowd and Jason Issacs are the most memorable. Ann Dowd best known for her Emmy-winning work as the sexually abusive zealot Aunt Lydia on The Handmaid’s Tale crackles like a log in a fire as she captures the tension of trying to keep the peace in a situation where there is none. She doesn’t run from what makes her uncomfortable but she can’t see it until the world around her burns down just a little longer. As for Jason Issacs, society keeps men on retainer when it comes to how they want them to show their emotions.
If vulnerability becomes necessary, men like Jay are called in for a night shift they can’t refuse because he’s on call for it. Eventually, Jay breaks and Issacs doesn’t stop until the retainer is completely void. I won’t even say why these people are meeting. Most critics have but I feel Mass is a better experience when you watch it with no indication of what will happen. Eventually, everything comes into focus. The context reveals its increasingly bright visibility but it’s a context with no answers.
These people are trying to make sense of what’s happened but it’s never going to make sense because it just doesn’t. What’s been done is something that will always always always always always be happening in our world, in America in particular and there’s nothing any of us can do about it. If real change ever happened, too many people would just rebel against it so there’s really no point. Mass offers no hope for the world because, at this point, there is no such thing but it does offer warmth, comfort, even love to three of its characters, the fourth is just too much in denial where too many still reside.
Denial of the most extreme and horrific is like an apartment nobody wants to lease but we have to. At some point, we have to acknowledge that there’s a certain falsehood in our surroundings that isn’t working anymore. Mass is a story of people trying to let go of repressing their trauma. They’re ready to come forward. By saying what they want to no matter the reaction, they release themselves which is my sole advice to everyone just beginning 2022. Maybe you don’t have the luxury of starting on a positive note but you can start on an honest one. Whatever’s hurting you is able to partly because too many pretend it’s not there. Stop pretending.
The ability to appreciate Mass depends on how serious you take what it is to be alive. How able you are to acknowledge that the worst is what’s there and sometimes, the only way out (If anything at all is possible) is through. Mass ends and the warmth you were able to get in the final minutes is something you must hold on to so tightly and never let go of. Whether this warmth isn’t enough so that mentally, you give yourself over completely to destruction or it’s enough to at least try to make a new beginning, I have no way of knowing what happens from here. I am choosing to hand myself over to any possible opportunities of peace and quietness 2022 has to offer me and so like these characters, I step outside to face the frost within. Or else, the heat.
IMDB. (2021). MASS (2021) [IMAGE]. Mass. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11389748/