Film Forgiveness

Christ and the Unthinkable

Mass culminates as every Mass does—with remembrance and communion.

CJ Green / 10.7.21

The film critic Katie Rife recently noted how weird Christian Communion is. Even first-century pagans, she writes, were “put off by rituals where members of this kooky new Jewish cult talked about eating the body and drinking the blood of their savior.” Her point was that Christianity is creepy—and that that much is obvious.

In truth, the cannibalistic Eucharist is only one piece of a more ancient framework involving the sacrifice of a paschal lamb, offered, slaughtered, then consumed; this is what Christ embodies on the cross. Disturbing! Barbarous! But the ritual’s barbarity is also what makes it crucial and, more often than not, pertinent to actual experience. The author Toni Morrison noticed this, too. A Catholic for much of her life, she maintained a respect for the bloodshed inherent to the faith. “We’re used to blood and gore,” she once said. “On the cross in the church, there’s the body, with the cuts and the bruises. Protestant churches: nice, clean cross. No body at all.” She went on to reflect that the crucifixion “really was about the flesh…and we forget that. This is real suffering. I was looking at [the Passion] like a lynching…this is a betrayed man who is hung, lynched.” Christ, for Morrison, was not a symbol of some abstract concept but an urgent testament to the kind of atrocities you might find in not-too-distant history or daily headlines. More recently, Christian thinkers have seen Jesus in tragedies like the death of George Floyd.

In a similar way, the new film Mass associates Christ with the victims of a school shooting. It’s an association made primarily through the setting—a church, which feels as intentionally present as any character. The church is Emmanuel Episcopal, the meaning of which is made clear on a tapestry in its entryway: God With Us. While a crucifix—with the body on it—hangs in the background, the characters describe injuries the shooting victims incurred, exactly where they were harmed, and how long they suffered. One critic noted the storyline’s “overwhelming difficulty, the kind that makes you wince to even think about.” Certainly viewers may find the subject unthinkable, but for the characters in the film, to know exactly what happened is to indicate honor and trustworthiness.

The title hints at two layers, the literal subject of a mass shooting, as well as the metaphorical, liturgical Mass (there is a degree to which the film itself follows an order of worship). In both cases, the word relates to a body of people—a sort of communion, however damaged. The film will not be known for its humor, but before the main characters arrive, there is an offbeat little prologue in which the church staff hastily arranges the set as carefully as they would an altar. Much discussion is had about where to place chairs, a spread of snacks, a box of tissues. They wonder aloud if the space is comfortable. Is the lighting good? There’s something funny in the juxtaposition between the concerns of the church and the movie’s weightier purpose. Niceties, while not entirely unimportant, seem insubstantial compared to the characters’ deeper needs.

For its main drama Mass brings together two couples—Gail and Jay (Martha Plimpton and Jason Isaacs), and Linda and Richard (Ann Dowd and Reed Birney)—who arrive at Emmanuel Church seeking closure six years after a school shooting took the life of Gail and Jay’s son, along with ten other children. It was Linda and Richard’s son, who also died, who did it. To her husband Gail privately confesses that she wants to forgive—to forgive the shooter, a boy named Hayden, as well as his parents, Linda and Richard—but she can barely say the word, much less conceive of effecting it. For most of the film, Gail and Jay chase after some justification, some reason why the shooting happened. Was it Hayden’s brain chemistry? Was it the way his parents raised him? Like a one-act play, Mass unfolds as a long, single conversation that lurches, full of half-sentences and apologies, blame-shifting and attempts at sense-making, but this is a situation for which no such tactics will suffice.

What makes forgiveness especially difficult is not just the seriousness of the crime — the suffering and death of Gail and Jay’s son—but the intention of it. What Hayden did was not an accident. The writer Elizabeth Bruenig recently observed that when people say they want to forgive someone, what they are often really doing is “trying to find ways to mitigate the offense.” But a mass shooting is unmitigable, which is why, despite the characters’ ostensible desire for it, forgiveness seems impossible. Eventually each character retreats to their own corner of the room, at a seeming stalemate. It becomes hard to imagine the film will amount to anything more than lament.

But it does. At the dead end of reasoning, the characters reach a turning point, alighting on what makes the loss so unforgivable in the first place: the personal. Linda—the penitential, teary-eyed mother of the shooter—asks Gail, “Will you tell me a story about your son?” In a feverish bout of tears, Gail does so. She recalls her own son’s humor, and the memory makes her laugh and cry, and afterward she admits, “I thought that if I forgave you, I’d lose him.” Instead she finds that forgiveness may be the way back to her son—the way to retrieve him from years of bitterness and grief, and to remember more of him than his cruel loss. For a moment of silent contemplation, the characters join together, now in a new corner of the same room. Here, Mass culminates as every Mass does, with remembrance and communion.

Then Linda tells a story of her own. Compared to Gail’s wistful recollection, Linda’s is violent. Her son once threatened to beat her, she says; naturally afraid, she fled to her room, locked the door. In hindsight, “I wish I had said, ‘Okay, hit me. You hit me, sweetheart. Hit me for as long as you’ll ever need.’ Because then I would have known him.” Her heartbreaking monologue once again evokes the crucified Christ—who knew his children through every scar they left on his body. Linda embodies this, too: Throughout the film, she avails herself, offering to be struck with blame and censure, an oblation for the sins of the past. But instead of hitting her, Gail embraces her.

It’s worth saying how unusual this ending is. Nothing compels Gail to forgive, and no one would blame her for not. As Bruenig says, “Forgiveness is not deserved by definition. It’s not something somebody earns. It’s something that’s freely given.”