Mass Review: A Brilliantly Acted Portrait of the Totality of Grief’s Presence

Actor Fran Kranz makes his writing and directing debut with Mass, a film with the feel of a play and, perhaps inevitably, one that provides a showcase for its actors. Taking place almost entirely in a room within a church, it depicts a meeting between two couples: Jay (Jason Isaacs) and Gail (Martha Plimpton), and Richard (Reed Birney) and Linda (Ann Dowd). While it’s initially unclear as to why they’ve gathered here, their conversation eventually reveals that Jay and Gail’s son Evan was a victim of a school shooting perpetrated by Richard and Linda’s son Hayden and that the meeting is an attempt at healing.

Though it at times succumbs to melodrama, Mass is largely free of the sensationalism that its narrative might suggest, in no small part due to the way that Kranz homes in on the emotional repercussions of violence and his actors’ multifaceted portrayal of grief. The meeting itself begins with the couples speaking in innocuous generalities. Isaacs, Plimpton, Birney, and Dowd play their roles in eloquently reserved fashion, and as the characters fight back tears and routinely give deferring glances to their respective partners, the actors’ subtle body language evocatively attests to how people struggle to withhold the agony of their true feelings.

Kranz’s characters eventually get around to sharing their honest sentiments, which is telegraphed by the film’s shift in aspect ratio and embrace of shaky handheld camera work. The actors make the viewer feel the immediacy of the characters’ emotions as they pour forth, but the couples’ conversation in Mass’s second half is given over to stories about their lost children that are platitudinous to the point of monotony, like the one Gail recounts about how a young Evan once angered her after coming home dirty from playing football.

These moments, often captured in jittery close-ups, find Kranz resorting to the melodrama that he previously went out of his way to avoid. The characters’ reminiscences are increasingly tinged with the sort of sentimentality that the film’s earlier elucidations of these individuals’ heartache didn’t make any room for, such as Kranz’s quietly empathetic lament for how each parent separately grappled with the school shooting in their own way. Another one of these notable—and especially wrenching—early scenes find Richard speaking of how he studied the minutiae of the crime scene as some form of coping mechanism.

Though the circumstances of the meeting are inarguably tragic, the film’s more maudlin moments merely feel like a forceful and unnecessary attempt to remind the audience of that fact. And though Mass nearly derails, what ultimately keeps it on track are its four leads, who approach their characters with a controlled restraint that consistently resists theatrics. In the hands of Isaacs, Plimpton, Birney, and Dowd, Mass gives such precise and profound expression to the totality of grief that it comes to feel downright palpable.