
“Ghostlight,” a film about an American construction worker’s potential involvement in a performance of “Romeo and Juliet,” explores how traumatized individuals confront themselves through art. ” It is chaotic in the same way that existence itself is chaotic. It is one of those movies that one can say is too long and yet, too short. American independent cinema is increasingly missing integrity and honesty in the Americans in touting the honor of creation, indeed, the film has its charm.
The film is co-directed by the Chicago-based filmmakers Kerry O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, the plot revolves around a family that is actually a family of actors working together. Dan (Keith Kupferer), head of the household, is an Australian construction worker. He has a teen daughter, Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), and a wife Sharon (Tara Mallen) and he lives in a suburban area. Clearly, this is a family with issues. You are able to tell that from the beginning of the film, long before the plot reveals all the fragments of their issues and gives them space to view them.
Some audiences will find frustrating Lose (which for me was one of the most interesting features of “Ghostlight”) The audience’s feeling is not who the family is about even for a considerable length of the film (it is only later I will not specify what it is, it is not a pleasant loss). For instance, it takes them a while to watch the show to understand why these performers are exhibiting such unconventional behavior.
Dan’s silent, and at times seems to be far away. In a sudden burst, his temper flares, which only ends up being dangerous. Daisy too gets worked up sometimes and is having her school discipline enforced because she lost her cool. She swears where most people would never dream of swearing and shows no regard for social prohibition. Sharon is a faithful wife, a caring mother, and a woman who is very much out of sorts as if she is doing everything by the skin of her teeth. With time, the reader discovers how the characters started to get into trouble in the dark and as their stories unveil, they begin feeling it’s burden themselves.
Dolly De Leon, who starred in the Triangle of Sadness, plays Rita. Her character in the local production is an actress who meets Dan because his crew is hammering away right next to the theater, and she ends up being the inspiration for him to join an extremely cheap community theater in ‘Romeo And Juliet’. Although it might sound ludicrous, it is a cheap rendition of Shakespeare’s epic. Even though Rita is in her fifties, she plays the role of Juliet. And when the much younger actor playing Romeo feels uncomfortable and cringes at what takes place, Dan, who just wanders in, has an unexpected role assigned to him.
Regrettably, it is a pain that a film has some of the harmonious moments.
Dan feels out of place not only because he has happened to take up a romantic role in a theater that he perceives as embarrassing (he is a macho man) but also due to the kissing scene. (There’s a lovely moment when the troupe’s director Lanora, played by Hanna Dworkin, explains how they can’t afford a closeness consultant and directs the two performers to try out movement for intimacy to prepare for the stage. Dan’s life as a secret is not what many consider offensive. Rather, the concern comes from anticipating what type of laughter and confusion this would elicit from viewers if it were a film or sitcom. It is like Marella devised some television show within the film where most of the episodes involve Daisy, played by the younger Kupferer in a manner that indeed provokes, “What if Joan Cusack and Nicolas Cage had a baby?” There is, i.e., even when she is small, some inherent bigness of expression in her acting performance.
However, that also proves to be the source of a number of the film’s pleasures. Daisy is a tornado, small in size but large in impact. At first, you may get annoyed with her, but you will eventually come to appreciate that Daisy and the actress who plays her are never one-dimensional characters. She is such a dominant presence on screen that even if she appears to be the passive party, stepping back so to speak to listen for her cue to speak, or to glue into a bigger scene, one just can’t help but focus onto her as she must be mulling over several ideas at once.
It is true that like mother like son, or perhaps I should say like both mom and dad: the older Kupferer, the older Mallen – all uncover the subtexts in the movie Mommy and Daddy and all manage to be bereaved from cliched reactions with the text. Towards the end, Mallen has a fairly good scene where Sharon has some of the wives watching and nagging their husbands to not put on the hero mask when it’s their wives ‘swans’ who do all the house and work, and that image will be painfully familiar to many. In the case of Daddy Kupferer, he portrays sadness differently and in a surprisingly quite realistic manner. It is clear why nobody is able to understand the pain that Dan is living with or see the signs of a man who is either about to go into a depression or burst into anger.
In any case, there were quite noticeable eng or Australian- comedy drams made twenty, or thirty years ago including the likes of the Full Monty, or brassed off and so forth which tackled such themes as liberating and the transformative use of art amongst people who were not so-called creative arts people. Patrick Wang’s recent magnum opuses a bread factory part one and a bread factory part probed similar themes but in a more formally ambitious way. “Ghostlight” is a worthy addition as well. It is a smart film, allowing the actors to become the characters, rather than forcing them to explain every detail.
It makes us empathize with them without making a slog or tearing down relevance into a quote that one would see on bumper stickers.
Ghostlight is a film that does not seem to fully utilize its great premise. It wouldn’t be shocking to discover a three or four-hour version in the drawers of the filmmakers. However, I do not think it is an inferior film because it did not succeed in exploring everything that it could have on paper. It appears to have been a kind of gut instinct that was quite effective in how it was made. In fact, it begins to test your patience but later becomes extremely effective as you begin to watch it. The film’s last thirty minutes are extremely impactful as there is a lot of imagery that the film alludes to that you cannot quite pinpoint what it means. Instead of trying to make sense out of everything, you feel as if the film is in its own world and you decide to ride along with it.
Some of the narrative choices that may at first be seen as ludicrous end up being very effective in the film as a drama, for example, the fact that the two main roles of Romeo and Juliet were played by older people which makes the audience think how age never impacts the mind. Also in this context, how tying this family’s grief towards a Shakespearean play about Romeo and Juliet was somehow the most effective way to carry this idea.
It appears this was the ideal move for the family and the film that follows them. Art is many things, but many would agree that one of its greatest mysteries is that in certain cases, in the hands of certain people, you can connect to a work that instinctively resonates nothing with the particularities of your life and, all of a sudden, think, “Wow. That’s me.”
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