An early draft of this review was originally published on June 22, 2024,
at Give Me Some Light on Substack, months before it appeared here.
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My high school English teacher raised eyebrows during my senior year when he started inviting students to his apartment in the evenings.
Today, I can imagine that such behavior might be concerning in view of how frequently we read headlines about abusive teachers. But in this case, the teacher’s intentions could not have been more honorable: He saw in some of us a curiosity about art that our fleeting classroom sessions could not sufficiently address, and he opened his home, which was designed with the austerity and grace of an elegant art gallery for fine photography, so that groups of us could sit comfortably in a circle, take on roles in famous plays, and read them aloud together in their entirety. Somewhere between five and a dozen students showed up each time, and we kept on meeting during the summer after my class graduated. It was an exciting way to discover that we could preserve what we loved most about our school experience even as we moved on toward new experiences.
I distinctly remember sessions where we were moved by King Lear and Death of a Salesman. We also watched Akira Kurosawa’s Ran together (in order to discover how a text like King Lear might be inventively re-interpreted in a new context). That’s where I first saw films like Jean de Florette and Manon of the Spring, as well as what would be become my all-time favorite film: Wings of Desire. I even remember watching U2: Rattle and Hum with this group and discussing the difference between powerful art and purposeful art.
The fact that Dead Poets Society opened in theaters that very summer to widespread critical acclaim and popularity seemed like a profound endorsement of our own not-so-secret club.
Those gatherings were among the most formative experiences of my life. They demonstrated for me what was possible if a person prioritized engagement with art in community. They showed me a way of living I hadn’t seen before. And the discoveries I made there, the epiphanies I experienced, made me fall in love with learning and growing through the cultivation of an empathetic imagination. What’s more, some of my most lasting and rewarding friendships took root there are flourishing still today. And I’ve tried to offer the same gift to friends and students ever since. I will always be grateful to that teacher for bearing up under the suspicions and rumors of fearful and presumptuous parents in order to show us paths into more enlightening and rewarding ways of living life and practicing faith.
This kind of experience is all too rare in our culture, and as a result too many people are content to target arts programs as frivolous (or dangerous) when cuts need to be made. (Just this week, Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida vetoed all grants for arts programs in Florida — plunging a knife into one of that state’s vital organs.) And yet, rare as that experience is, it’s common enough — and important enough — that we occasionally see a movie set on inspiring others to seek it out.
This year, one of those movies is Ghostlight.
In Ghostlight, a grizzled and grouchy Dan (Keith Kupferer) — a husband, a father, a construction worker — reaches the limits of his patience in all three roles that he plays. Pressures at work are high and constant. Money is tight. And, most painful of all, he, his wife Sharon (Tara Mallen, the real-life spouse of Kupferer), and his self-destructively brash daughter Daisy (Katherine Mallen Kupferer, who is, yes, Keith and Tara’s actual daughter) are grieving a family tragedy. All it might take is for a driver to honk at Dan in the wrong moment, and he’ll explode in a way that his whole family will regret.
And if Dan explodes, somebody could get hurt. He’s a grizzled, broad-shouldered, James-Gandolfini type; I wouldn’t want him grabbing me by the lapels, slamming me against a wall, and roaring in my face.
What can save Dan from the repressed grief and rage that’s consuming him? Taking on a fourth role.
That is to say, a theatrical role.
When a stranger — Rita (Dolly De Leon, who you’ll remember if you saw Triangle of Sadness) — notices Dan on the edge of self-destruction and invites him into a community theater to participate in a table reading of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, a small star appears in Dan’s dark sky, a light with a strange allure.
While Dan keeps stumbling back to that small and diverse group of wounded but creative people, even though he doesn’t seem to understand what’s drawing him there, he begins slowly surrendering his inhibitions and discovering relief from his debilitating stresses through the experience of losing himself in the creative process.
And as he begins to play different roles in the company of those uninhibited and enthusiastic actors, his capacity for considering what the world might look like to others, others for whom he has shown little no patience or compassion in the past, begins to change. When he begins to see that he might be complicit in the causes of his troubles, and when he begins to loosen his grip on his pent-up emotions and let some of that pressure burn off in performance, he might finally begin to grieve.
Ghostlight, written by Kelly O’Sullivan (whose 2019 debut, Saint Frances, impressed me) and directed by O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson (her partner), might be listed in a category with Dead Poets Society and Drive My Car, both films in which people’s hearts and minds expand through engagement with great works of art. It might be mentioned alongside the classic Jesus of Montreal, in which actors participating in a Passion Play are increasingly and mysteriously influenced by the roles they’re playing in the pageant, including the actor playing Jesus, whose decisions lead him into more and more dangerous and controversial behavior.
Unfortunately, I don’t think I’ve ever spent so much time as a movie played thinking about all the notes I would have made on the screenplay. Surely someone along the way thought to challenge O’Sullivan on just how contrived things seem when we learn exactly why the text of Romeo and Juliet is affecting Dan so deeply. It’s easy to guess that his participation in the play will help him work through the trauma of his family’s devastating loss. But the connections between the real-life tragedy and the Shakespearean drama are just too much; the revelation punctured my suspension of disbelief and almost spoiled the movie for me.
What kept me watching and caring, and what eventually moved me to tears, was the revelatory performance Keith Kupferer. I recognize him from a few films going back many years, but I never knew he had this kind of talent. (Apparently, Chicago theatergoers have known the Kupferer family and their strengths for quite a while. I’m very curious about what I’ve missed.)
Despite the film’s weaknesses, I hope that moviegoers will see it and spread the word about its inspirational power. Arts programs are struggling in schools across the country. The Christian university where I teach recently cut their theater program, which has had a huge influence on Seattle’s beloved Taproot Theatre, down to just one full-time professor, and what was once an English Department faculty of more than a dozen full-time English professors has been cut down to five.
If there is any hope for amending the polarization, hatred, and violence poisoning American culture today, the arts will be essential to showing us the way. I’d argue that if Christians are concerned about loving their neighbors and encouraging compassion and empathy, they should be expanding arts programs, not cutting them.
The imagination is the territory in which hearts and minds are most powerfully transformed. If anything has kept my faith and hope alive in my lifetime, it has been the arts. Theater, cinema, literature, music — these have been the arenas in which we step outside of the contentious dynamics of argument and culture wars and dared to imagine what the experiences of our neighbors might be like. Without these exercises in imagination and empathy, I don’t know how I would have learned to follow Christ’s prevailing instruction: Love your neighbor.
Although Ghostlight makes no explicit references to religion, I would daresay that it gives us one of this year’s most dramatic and emotionally engaging portrayals of what the hard work of humility, grace, and forgiveness looks like. And it will stir emotions in audience just as powerfully as any of those films I just mentioned.
I’d also argue that the ensemble cast is just as engaging as the one in Dead Poet’s Society, particularly the real-world family playing the family at the center. I really hope Keith Kupferer’s performance will be remembered and honored with an Oscar nomination so that the movie gets a much bigger push and much larger audiences.
Speaking of Oscars, I thought about CODA a lot while watching this. That was another crowd-pleasing, family-focused film about the call of the arts changing the course of a young person’s life. And I wonder if Ghostlight has a chance of picking up steam like that film did and becoming a dark-horse Best Picture nominee. If Ghostlight were filmed with greater visual imagination, stronger cinematography, and a more subtle and creative approach to entangling Dan’s tragedy with the text of Romeo and Juliet, I’d probably find a place for it in my 2024 top five list. As it is, I’ll go on recommending the film for its meaningful observations about the power of art, and for Keith Kupferer’s indelible performance — one of the best I’ve seen from an American actor in recent years.
Take note that Ghostlight is in theaters right now, just a few weeks before Sing Sing opens, a movie about Shakespeare plays transforming the lives of prisoners. What a year for movies about the power of participating in live theater! I suspect that the two films will be compared and contrasted frequently for many months to come.