The film opens, even during the credits, with the radiant song Oh, what a beautiful morning from Rogers’s “Oklahoma” – echoes of another serene fairy-tale life. “Oklahoma”, although it will play some role in this dramatic film, is still a musical, a conventional genre, not reflecting reality, but our optimism, which reinforces it, provokes it, that’s why it is beautiful. And “Ghost Light” seems like a domestic drama about a grieving family. The father is a road worker, the mother sits sadly at home, the nervous daughter makes scandals at school and is already on the verge of expulsion. And their teenage son Brian committed suicide because of his father’s prohibition to follow his girlfriend to another city. The details of this tragedy will be revealed to us closer to the end, but they are truly heartbreaking.
The whole show was created by stage actress Kelly O’Sullivan, who discovered her talent as a screenwriter, and her co-director (and life partner) Alex Thompson. In this film, family values generally triumph, because the trio of main characters – husband Dan, wife Sharon and daughter Daisy – are played by real-life husband Keith Kapferer, his wife Tara Mallen and daughter Katherine Mullen Kapferer. Either this circumstance touched the hearts of critics, or the authors’ innovative idea of reproducing the clash of Romeo and Juliet in our modern times, but the film was received with joy, which I respect, but it is difficult for me to understand.
In Dan, the road worker with a jackhammer, amateur theatre activist Rita spotted a talented actor and invited him to a rehearsal to play Shakespeare’s Capulet from the pit. He is brought into the company without looking, even though he hasn’t read Shakespeare, and his daughter introduces him to the play, showing him a photo of Baz Luhrman with DiCaprio on her laptop. Rita herself, despite her advanced age, plays Juliet, frightening the boy playing Romeo with the prospect of kissing her on her smoky lips.
Everything here raises vague doubts. If fifty-year-old Rita (Dolly de Leon), with the appearance and voice of a drag queen, wanted to perform on stage, why exactly young Juliet? And how can a road worker, who has heard about Shakespeare for the first time, suddenly master iambic pentameter and lines whose meaning, by his own admission, he does not understand?
Okay, so to speak. But along the way, the grey-haired giant Dan, convinced of his talent, will be entrusted with the role of Romeo himself, a sixteen-year-old boy. And here, I won’t hide, I was already politically incorrectly horrified at the prospect of seeing the two of them in an intimate scene.
I understand the audience, who will be entertained by episodes of rehearsals, breathing exercises and coordination exercises of intimate episodes, performed as if by amateur theatre actors. Perhaps they will find interesting the proposal of old Dan to change the ending of Shakespeare’s play so that the lovers survive and find the happiness they deserve. It is more difficult to understand the audience of the resulting performance, which not only filled the theatre to capacity, but also came to the conclusion that this show was much better than on Broadway. Even though the most successful moment of the performance, judging by the film, was the collapse of fat Romeo from the stairs when he tried to climb to Juliet’s balcony.
Theoretically, the saving intention of such a film, conceived as a two-hour psychotherapeutic session, is obvious. At fifty, everything is just beginning. And, they say, art heals any wound, returning reason and peace of mind. And, they say, down with complexes, accept yourself as you are. All this is extremely noble in concept, but questions remain for the screenwriter. Not only did he come up with a story incredible to the point of banality, where one should drool over goodness, but he also returned cinema to the 50s of the last century, when tons of openly manipulative films and cinematic fairy tales about talented people who built the best out of nothing were released in the world theater. As in the forgotten Austrian magazine film “The Child of the Danube”, but there was still Marika Reck with her virtuoso dance. And there was a genre that was fundamentally far from reality.
Here we spent an hour watching a seemingly realistic story about how actors in an amateur troupe were rehearsing Shakespeare, and suddenly the daring Daisy began to sing “I Can’t Say No” from “Oklahoma” in front of an invisible orchestra, and on a stage she improvised. In the gymnasium, out of the sheer enthusiasm of the penniless people, a theatre with lights and a remote control emerged: the convention of a very old musical began. Let us also include among the pleasant conventions the scene in which Daisy, who was not distinguished by a sublime system of thought, confidently begins to rap Shakespeare’s prologue.
Of course, when going to see all this, one must take into account what amateur theatre represents in the life of a typical American. There, every provincial university has its own theatre with an orchestra and a director who, on a professional level, performs with the musical students of Sullivan, Rogers or Webber himself. There Romeo and Juliet are in the blood, like Cheburashka in our country, acting is part of the learning process: school performances are the same everyday norm as a school baseball team. All this brings everyday life as close as possible to the game; perhaps this different mentality provided such an artistically committed image of popular love.
Whether this will be repeated on our screens, where political correctness has not yet reached blinding intensity, will be shown by the rental reports. The lighting in the film seemed too ghostly to me.
