Ghostlight: This is the best film I’ve seen this year
This deeply moving, highly intelligent film is about love, loss, grief, regret, repressed emotions, healing and the value of human connection. Its star should receive an Oscar nomination.
The American drama Ghostlight, which parallels a working class family in Illinois with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, is the best film I have seen this year. The star, Keith Kupferer, should receive an Oscar nomination.
This poignant film is a thespian family affair. Kupferer’s wife, Tara Mallen, plays his on-screen spouse and their child, Katherine Mallen Kupferer, plays their daughter. Together they deliver something close to flawless.
The young Kupferer also deserves an Oscar nomination. As 16-year-old Daisy, a rebellious high-schooler who is mature beyond her years, she centres a family that, as in Romeo and Juliet, has been broken into pieces by the decisions of star-crossed lovers.
This movie is directed by actor-writer-director Kelly O’Sullivan and written by writer-director Alex Thompson. In 2019 they swapped those roles on the comedy-drama Saint Frances.
The result is a deeply moving, highly intelligent film about love, loss, grief, regret, repressed emotions, healing and the value of human connection. As heartbreaking as it is, it is not without humour.
It’s a tricky film to review because I want to say why it’s so good but I can’t reveal too much of the plot, which is full of surprises. The meta level — the connection with Romeo and Juliet — takes the story to expected and unexpected places.
Dan Mueller (Kupferer) is a blue-collar worker. In the opening scenes he’s helping put down a new road. Soon after he has a physical altercation with a motorist.
This incident is witnessed by Rita (Dolly De Leon), a former Broadway actor who helps run a community theatre. She approaches Dan and asks him to join the cast of their next production, Romeo and Juliet. She, at 50ish, is Juliet.
Dan has not read the play. After some back and forth, he joins the group. The scene where the amateur actors do a table reading, wielding their pens as swords, is hilarious. But it’s not a pastiche of community theatre. It’s full of respect.
Dan’s wife, Sharon, is a schoolteacher. Their daughter is the one who knows Shakespeare’s work best of all. When she learns her father has agreed to join the cast of Romeo and Juliet, she plays him a film version on her laptop.
“It’s old but it’s good,’’ she tells him. I suspected it was coming, but I still laughed out loud when the shot cuts to the screen to show Leonardo DiCaprio in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet back in prehistoric 1996.
As Dan comes to know the play, he loses it on a couple of occasions.
He sees the links to his own life. When asked if he has children, he says he has two. He’s told to imagine one of them dying.
He tells the director (Hanna Dworkin) and fellow cast members that the ending has to be changed. When he’s told the ending can’t be changed “because it’s Shakespeare”, he yells “Who gives a f**k!?”
As Lord Capulet, father of Juliet, says, “My joys are buried.”
Yet as Dan comes to understand the play, he finds the love that is part of the tragedy. In scene after scene his performance is of Shakespearean magnitude.
The title, Ghostlight, refers to a single light in an otherwise darkened theatre, said to be there for ghosts. There are ghosts in Dan’s life, and Sharon’s and Daisy’s. I think it also refers to Shakespeare’s frequent subversion of light and dark.
When the play itself is staged, including one of the actors singing Stand By Me, it is uplifting to watch. It’s a Romeo and Juliet I’d like to see. After the curtain falls, Rita says to Dan, “Next time, we’ll do a comedy.” That, too, I’d like to see.
This is a definite four-and-a-half star film. I have decided to up it to five stars because I want to draw attention to this low-budget, low-publicity, low-hype drama that brings ordinary lives out of unexpected, unwanted darkness and puts them into sustaining, self-sourced light.
Ghostlight
115 minutes
In cinemas
