Mass...👍🏻 why is no one talking about this?!

Mass

Oh my gosh! I had heard that “Mass” was insane but I guess I had just pushed that thought aside. It was so powerful and such an incredible look at the human experience and what people go through. For those who don’t know, which I’m guessing not a lot of people do seeing as NO ONE is talking about this movie. Seriously, good thing I live by the independent film theater in Salt Lake City, or I would have never heard of this movie. Anyway, this film is set around four people, two sets of parents meeting after one parent's child kills another parent's child then kills himself. The dialogue in this movie is so satisfying. That’s what I want to touch on first.

You know that the dialogue must be good if the film has almost nothing else to rely on. I mean, the whole movie, almost, takes place in this one drab, uninteresting room. The rest of the film, outside of the room, is all in a familiar looking episcapol church. There is little to no score, there are little to no supporting characters, there are no set or scenery changes. There is nothing to divert your attention away from the dialogue. The dialogue is the kind of dialogue that, like “Angels in America,” if it’s taken out and read on it’s own, might not be meaningful or even make sense, but given the context of the film, you understand exactly what each character means and their motivation for saying what they said. This actually reminded me quite a bit of a play in the way the focus was on the dialogue and not the sets or production design.

The characters were each fantastically flushed out! And that is the good thing about really only having four main characters, you have the time to really dig into each of them and uncover what is going on inside of them. All of them, I could feel what they were feeling and understand where they were coming from when they said certain things. Reed Birney and Ann Dowd play the parents of the boy who killed people in his school and then himself and I could feel the complex feeling the parents would have felt between wanting to stand by their son and honor his memory, and comforting the parents who had also lost a child. I thought that aspect of the film was handled really beautifully.

This leads directly into the next element of this film that I wanted to discuss. The acting! Of the minimal things I had heard about this film before I saw it, the acting was the thing I heard the most about. Ann Dowd has received the most hype for her role on this film, which she readily deserves. Everyone else, though, deserves some hype. Jason Isaacs was just incredible! I thought he played the parts of being friendly, being mad, and being extremely sad just masterfully! If I did not look it up, I would have no idea that was Lucius Malfoy, I never would have ever known. He just lost himself in this character.

Martha Plimpton was just great at playing a more emotionally conservative mother. I felt like her character's breakthrough towards the end wasn’t earned or impactful quite as much as Ann Dowd’s or Jason Isaacs’ but it was still really really good. I have watched her career for a while, meaning that I’ve seen her in a lot of things, and she deserves a role like this! Good on her! Reed Birney did such a good job in his role. His performance is maybe the weakest of the four, but that’s not saying much since all of the performances were so good! He kind of seemed angry and distant the whole movie which may have been just his character, not the acting, maybe he was working through some stuff inside himself. So, if anyone is keeping track, my ranking goes Ann Dowd and Jason Isaacs tied for number one, Martha Plimpton at two, and Reed Birney at three.

Ahh! I loved this movie! I LOVED this movie! I loved that it was set in a church, an episcopal church at that because that represents Christianity and forgiveness while also representing impartiality and objectivity. If you can, go see it! Please!