Yahoo News ‘Ghostlight’ Review: A Disarming Dramedy About Grief, Theater and Finding Your People
Is there a more exhaustively, and exhaustingly, tackled theme in American independent film than grief?
Festival lineups and arthouses are littered with stories — some somber, some quirk-laden — of loss and trauma, mourning and memory, learning to live and love again after the passing of a child, a spouse, a sibling, a parent. Despite sublime exceptions like Manchester by the Sea and Rachel Getting Married, a dispiriting majority are basically cinematic white noise; there’s a numbing, rinse-and-repeat sameness to all the emotional repression, breakthroughs and release. Trying to take a shortcut to our most painful feelings, these films have the contrary effect of activating our defenses or, worse, our indifference.
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Luckily, there are portraits of grief that bulldoze past our resistance, and their own shortcomings, thanks to the sheer force of their sincerity. Ghostlight, from Chicago-based writing-directing team Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson, is one of them. A dramedy about a construction worker finding comfort in community theater following the death of his son, the movie wrings goofy humor and heart-squeezing sweetness from its gimmicky premise and casting (the central onscreen family is played by an actual offscreen family). Unlike so much “product” on both studio and indie ends of the spectrum, it feels homemade — in the refreshing, and occasionally limiting, ways that adjective implies.
Similarly to the filmmakers’ Saint Frances, which centered on a woman who grows close to the kid she’s nannying while recovering from an abortion, Ghostlight tends to smother its pricklier subject matter in softness. You may wish it were sharper, more disciplined, less eager to please. But gradually, with warmth, jolts of off-kilter comedy and appealing performances — including a deliciously tart turn from Dolly De Leon (Triangle of Sadness) — the movie works its way under your skin. O’Sullivan and Thompson’s touch isn’t subtle, but it’s generous and, at times, gently inventive; they don’t sidestep clichés so much as configure and reconfigure them in satisfying, sometimes stirring fashion.
Middle-aged construction worker Dan (Keith Kupferer) lives in an Illinois suburb with wife Sharon (Tara Mallen) and their teen daughter, Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer). The latter is a brash hellion whose anger management issues are written and played at a self-consciously heightened pitch that takes getting used to; early scenes of her bickering with her parents feel forced in a sitcomish, workshoppy way, as if the performers were still figuring out how to untangle their fictional relationships from their real-life ones (Kupferer and Mallen are married, and Mallen Kupferer is their daughter).
Ghostlight settles into a more agreeable groove when Dan finds himself increasingly intrigued by the rag-tag group gathering daily at a theater near his work site. As he discovers, these folks of different ages, styles and skin colors are a local troupe rehearsing Romeo and Juliet. A succession of contrivances results in Dan’s recruitment by Rita (De Leon), the bossy, chain-smoking, F-bomb-dropping actress who is this production’s unlikely Juliet. First tapped to play Lord Capulet, Dan is then promoted to Romeo — not for his chops, per se, but because he’s an age-appropriate match for the 50ish Rita. In what’s perhaps one farcical wrinkle too many, the newly minted leading man keeps his extracurricular activity a secret from his family.
That doesn’t last long. Soon enough, Daisy, an avid theater geek, is coaching Dan in iambic pentameter and showing him Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet (“Leonardo DiCaprio does not look like that anymore,” she pronounces, a welcome bit of drive-by savagery in a movie that errs on the side of niceness). As he digs into his role, Dan discovers haunting parallels with his own experience — or, more precisely, that of his late son. Ghostlight posits a rather audaciously literal-minded vision of art’s power to help us decipher our lives and empathize with people, even when they do unfathomable things.
The details of what happened to Dan’s son emerge progressively. There are mentions of an upcoming deposition, then a tense run-in with a distressed young woman (a wrenching Lia Cubilete) at a carnival. It’s a devastating backstory, giving the film an undertow of darkness that makes the comic notes, when they land, feel especially merciful.
Ghostlight’s fish-out-of-water conceit isn’t the freshest; macho men getting in touch with their sensitive side is just about par for the course in our post-Sopranos and –Barry cultural landscape. But the assorted oddballs who make up the troupe (played by Chicago repertory actors) are a delight — ardent ambassadors to an exotic world of breathing exercises, improv games and unfamiliar syntax. The movie gets giggles, and a guffaw or two, from rehearsal scenes in which this fractious crew of amateur thespians navigate jealousies (“Iago! Lady Mac-B!” a hungry young Tybalt hisses when Dan snags the lead part), varying skill levels, and inconveniences like kissing a costar with cigarette breath. Special shoutout to Hanna Dworkin as the troupe’s director; her reaction to a particularly grand Lady Capulet (“My child, my only child!”) is a low-key hoot. Best of all is De Leon, who finds just the right balance of absurdity and pathos in this aging, acid-tongued actress playing the stage’s most iconic dewy ingenue.
The casting of the three leads ultimately pays off in a lived-in intimacy that can’t be faked. Mallen Kupferer gives Daisy’s passion for theater an infectious giddiness that poignantly offsets the character’s blasé posturing and belligerence. And Kupferer, with his gruff courtliness, makes Dan much more nuanced than the usual lovable lug; nervously reciting lines to Sharon in bed — “For I never saw a true beauty ‘till this night” — he’s a figure of unexpected romantic delicacy.
The filmmakers keep things visually modest, brisk and mostly buoyant, right up through the climactic performance, a joyous, adrenaline-spiked mess of an opening night that even curmudgeonly viewers will find hard to resist. Dan might not share his colleagues’, or his daughter’s, keenness for the craft. But under the dusty glow of the spotlight, he embraces the opportunity to face his pain — and perhaps, for a few brief moments, to leave it behind.
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