Mass Parent Guide

The death of a child is every parent’s worst nightmare. With every school shooting, terrified parents pray for their kids’ safety and hug them tight when they get home. But if that beloved child dies – or, worse yet, kills other students – that relief never comes. Grief, guilt, and anger take its place and life is never the same again.

Mass scripts an encounter between two sets of bereaved parents: Jay and Gail (Jason Issacs and Martha Plimpton) and Linda and Richard (Ann Dowd and Reed Birney). It’s been six years since a school shooting bereaved both families and now they’re meeting in person to ask and answer questions about their sons; one the killer; the other his victim. Their meeting features attacks and angry outbursts, tears and awkward apologies, fond memories and aching bewilderment. Most of all, there’s pain, pain that fills the screen and floods into the theater. There is no denying that these people are badly wounded, crippled by anguish, broken and torn apart. The emotion is inescapable: this is the only movie I’ve ever seen where the audience was motionless at the end of the film, audibly weeping in the dark.

By every measure, Mass is a thespian tour-de-force with stellar performances from the lead performers. Jason Isaacs plays Jay with a calm veneer over his simmering rage, channeling his energy into activism. Martha Plimpton’s Gail is numb with grief, desperate to find meaning in the tragedy that has overwhelmed her. Ann Dowd portrays Linda as a woman fraying, her innate gentleness coming through the cracks in her fragmenting self. And Reed Birney’s Richard has spent so much time in guilt and anger that he seems to have entered a world that is almost beyond emotion. All four cast members are shoo-ins for Academy Award nominations and a win by any of them will be richly deserved.

Unfortunately, the rest of the film is merely adequate and doesn’t measure up to the moving performances. Mass feels like a stage production adapted (not always successfully) for the big screen; I was startled to learn that the screenplay was written for this movie. At times the dialogue feels stage-y, as if it was meant to be projected over footlights. Also irksome are the film’s secondary characters, with the minister’s over-anxious wife (Breeda Wool) making every scene feel strained. In addition, the characters’ emotional journey feels a bit too smoothly scripted to achieve the desired catharsis, but that’s a minor quibble in an otherwise powerful story. There are also a smattering of mostly minor profanities (and a single sexual expletive) but those won’t deter most adult viewers. The movie is emphatically not suited to youngsters for thematic reasons and two hours of four people talking around a table is unlikely to appeal to teens, even if they might benefit from seeing the excruciating consequences of violence.

The impact of this movie can’t be denied. It is a story that goes into the heart of suffering, that unflinchingly looks at anguish, guilt, despair, anger, and loss. But it’s also a story about healing. And while it isn’t a specifically Christian film, it will certainly appeal to Christian viewers and anyone else who resonates to the words of the soundtrack’s ubiquitous hymn, “Why should this anxious load press down your weary mind?...Come cast your burdens on the Lord and trust his constant care.” Jay, Gail, Linda, and Reed give viewers hope that peace is within reach and that’s a message we all need to hear.