Ghostlight
A gift of a movie, Ghostlight makes good on the promise that the filmmaking team of Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson showed in Saint Frances, exploring even deeper emotions without losing the collaborators’ edgy sense of humor and plentiful heart.
Their follow-up is a work full of carefully calibrated choices, and seeing as the co-directors are partners in their personal lives, there’s a poetry to them also casting a real-life family as the grieving mother/father/daughter trio at the core of this wholly realistic dramedy.
Playing Chicago construction worker Dan Mueller (Keith Kupferer, The Dark Knight), schoolteacher Sharon (Tara Mallen, Dark Matter), and mouthy teen Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret.), the real-world household exhibits a palpable comfort and ease in each other’s company, but are also clearly playing fictional characters and don’t let their shared history override what needs to occur for the plot to succeed.
As such, the bottled-up Dan’s odd pull to join a community theater production of Romeo and Juliet and keep it a secret from his family and friends plays out stunningly well, as do his tense interactions with his wife and daughter as they prepare for an ambiguous deposition that’s clearly weighing on them all.
O’Sullivan, who wrote the screenplay, drops tantalizing bread crumbs about what’s befallen the Muellers, then tosses a whole basket of loaves at viewers in one of the film’s big emotional moments. And while the subject matter of the Shakespeare play overlaps so much with Dan’s experience that it's as if Charlie Kaufman devised it, the catharsis it brings suggests that extreme, on-the-nose coincidence is what it takes for certain people to grieve and start to heal.
That assessment may make Ghostlight sound like a dark, depressing affair. And while that element is present, it’s balanced out by a consistent sense of humor that radiates cast-wide, namely as super-outsider Dan attempts to feel comfortable within the theater company’s volunteer cast.
Quirky personalities abound in these rehearsals, and Kupferer establishes a winning platonic chemistry with Dolly De Leon’s former professional actor Rita, who’s having her own needs met by playing Juliet after years of being told she’s wrong for the part.
The wealth of laughs additionally include one of the year's best jokes in which Daisy, prompted by her dad’s curiosity about the play, hypes up the “really old” Romeo and Juliet movie as a classic. But instead of then cutting to the 1968 Franco Zeffirelli version, she queues up the 1996 Baz Luhrmann one, complete with commentary that Leonardo DiCaprio “does not look like that” today.
Building to the night of the one-off performance, O’Sullivan continues to organically dole out answers about the Family Mueller while she and Thompson elicit powerful performances within powerful performances, making the most of the interconnected narrative and more than likely inspiring moviegoers to wipe away a few big fat tears.
But despite these gains, the elephant in the room remains the lack of talk about the titular safety/superstitious stage item. Such an object is visible during rehearsals at the community theater space and it possibly takes on a new significance in the film’s climax, but seeing as the word isn’t uttered once, viewers not hip to theater lingo (and/or who haven’t seen Season Four of Only Murders in the Building) might feel left out about why this lovely little film is called what it’s called.
Grade: B-plus. Rated R. Now playing at Grail Moviehouse
(Photo: IFC Films)
