Someone major once said: When watching a movie, if you reach the 20 minute mark and you have not liked it yet, you can turn it off. You are not going to like it it. I have seen this true a lot of times. Now with Mass we have a movie that doesn't just defy that rule--but reverses it!
The first 20 minutes of this movie is tedious prattling. The character played by Breeda Wool is quite obnoxious for no reason that serves the ideas of the movie. She overdoes the nervous, apologetic ineffectualness of a sincere do-gooder in the face of human tragedy, which will always be partly unknowable to those who weren't there. And this ineffectual, fussy prattling about the placement of chairs, ect...Goes on for 20 minutes! It's trying to intimate the horror that will be faced, but a cut-out paper heart on a window is to weak an image, too trite, too vague. Fran Kranz's writing fails here. He was clearly trying to be ominous in a gentle way, but that's subtle, hard to do. The scene is crowded with 3 characters when one would have done--for 1 minute, not 20. It is a mundane setting of the scene, nothing more, though it wants to be.
And THEN...at exactly the 20 minute point, the four leads arrive. Although the only significant sympathetic interesting people in this human story don't even show up on camera for 20 minutes, we soon are transported. The next 90 minutes is a brilliant, heartbreaking, heart-expanding quadrologue of horrifying murder, devastating loss. To say Fran Kranz's writing here succeeds astoundingly is an understatement. This is a writer of real human knowing; this approaches greatness. By the end I was in a trance of tragedy, surrendering to the truth of our fallenness. Wow! And the four leads are superb.
So the 20 Minute Rule be darned! The only other movie I remember for this is Cobb, starring Tommy Lee Jones. The first 20 minutes of that is very weak. Then Cobb takes over, through Jones, and it is just fascinating, poetic, tragic, loaded with fate.
As is Mass. My advice: Skip the first 20 minutes and go right to it. I'm not kidding--the opening is terrible but the meat of the movie will nurture your soul. At a price, Ugarte, at a price.
