The film-makers Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson know their way around the peaks and valleys of the everyday. Their breakout 2019 feature Saint Frances, written and starring O’Sullivan, sublimated what could be big strokes of drama – abortion, postpartum depression, getting older, lost time – into the unremarkable (on the outside) relationship between an aimless 34-year-old and her six-year-old nannying charge. The daily humors and challenges in one woman’s life were not particularly dramatic or arresting, but rendered with such curiosity and acceptance as to feel radical.
Ghostlight, the duo’s new feature premiering at the Sundance film festival, traffics in a similar leveling of mundanity and insight. (It’s also written by O’Sullivan.) There’s an appealing naturalness to the project, probably owing to its tight-knit origins: O’Sullivan and Thompson are real-life partners directing a real-life family in their city, Chicago. Dan Mueller (Keith Kupferer) is an emotionally bottled construction worker, all slumped shoulders and soft mumblings, except for the few moments he bursts forth with startling rage. He’s distant from wife Sharon (Kupferer’s wife Tara Mallen), an elementary school music teacher seeking to reconnect. Neither know how to handle Daisy (their daughter Katherine Mallen Kupferer, bristling with talent), a high-schooler with a near-terminal case of teenage nightmare syndrome. It’s often funny, how easily Daisy can escalate and derail a moment, until O’Sullivan’s finely tuned script and Mallen Kupferer’s hot-blooded performance reveal just how derailed she is.
As in Saint Frances, a chance encounter turns into a near-instant avenue for redemption: through contrivance and invitation, Dan ends up at a table read for a very DIY community theater production of Romeo and Juliet. The company is an island of misfit toys, according to its leader Rita, a hard-shelled ex-Broadway actor and self-described bitch played by Dolly De Leon. As in Triangle of Sadness, she blazes in every scene, not missing a single ego-deflating punchline. This production of Romeo and Juliet is not a glamorous gig, and Dan is not a natural theater actor. But the process of theater – exercises, rehearsal, bonding, fighting, garbling iambic pentameter – begin to open up his deep well of grief.
The Kupferer-Mallens are Chicago theater stalwarts, having founded their own company, and the affection everyone involved with this project feels for the stage – as an art, therapy and practice – is so evident as to be contagious, even in the film’s most theater-y meta moments. It helps that O’Sullivan’s default tone as a writer is sardonic, with an eye for human foibles and everyday indignities. The members of Rita’s theater collective are, unsurprisingly but endearingly, eccentric theater types (in the case of one recently graduated college student harping about intimacy coordinators, a bit too much of a caricature). All talk the talk of getting into the headspace of a character, yet are never not themselves; their charming quirkiness buoys the film as it inches closer to the Muellers’ unimaginable pain, the contours of which are steadily revealed over the film’s two hours.
O’Sullivan demonstrated a penchant for heavy-handedness in Saint Frances, and dabbles in it here; the parallels between the Muellers’ loss and Shakespeare’s tragedy are a bit too square to buy. If anything, Ghostlight’s crime is of being too well-structured, its alignment between the real and the pretend too synchronous to match the film’s otherwise finely worn, wholly believable texture and Kupferer’s sublime performance. That texture is at once familiar and rare. Though Dan and his family have experienced unusual, devastating grief, the scenery of their lives is ordinary, ornery and humbling: car horns, work sites, road rage; a talent-free elementary school musical; therapy appointments and lawyerly meetings for an upcoming deposition – the Muellers are involved in a lawsuit – in cookie-cutter offices. In other words, the vast yet underappreciated, on screen, purview of people in unsung places trying their best to make things work.
Even when pockmarked with tragedy, the Muellers never feel special, in the typical cinematic sense of remarkable beauty, power or circumstances. But that doesn’t make their experience, or the film’s achievement in rendering the specific healing of one family, any less profound.
Ghostlight is showing at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution
