There is a moment early in Mouse, involving the young woman whose sudden and jarring absence will come to define so much of this story and about these characters, that is such a deliberate contrivance that it single-handedly illustrates the difference between good and desperate types of manipulation. Callie (Chloe Coleman) speaks of her dreams as an actress—the attention of a prestigious school for the arts, the accolades that lead to awards glory, the hustling she plans to do to get there. Just a few hours later, she will be dead—the victim of a single-car accident while on her way home from a voice lesson.
Her life will end. Those dreams will go unrealized. The placement at that educational institution will be doled out to the next viable candidate, the awards will be heaped upon somebody else, and another person’s efforts will be rewarded by the whole, ruthless process.
Is this not how it actually happens in real life, where the machinations of the film world are the stuff of fantasy and fiction? As much as the idea of a young woman speaking only hours before her death of the life she plans to live is a dramatic contrivance, we’ve seen or heard or read about too many similar instances—of lives taken too soon, either on the eve of graduation or, as in this case, on the eve of college attendance—for it to be entirely a contrivance of fiction. Directors Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s movie understands that there is a difference between blithely accepting a contrivance on the face of it and fully buying into the truth it communicates.
This is a wholly special and unflinching film about grief, told from a pair of perspectives—one we instantly anticipate, because it is the one had by the girl’s mother, and the other we anticipate less, because it’s from Callie’s best friend in the whole world. She’s Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer), and immediately, we understand how special their dynamic and their bond are on account of these performances and the delicate screenwriting (by O’Sullivan). No one could possibly understand Minnie quite like Callie does, because Minnie’s a bit of an oddball, very much otherwise a loner and harboring a secret about herself that becomes clearer and clearer as the story moves ahead.
It is possible that others could have understood Callie at a level that rivals Minnie—though, of course, the bond of true best friends probably means that Callie, a bubbly and generally popular girl whom everyone seems to like, has levels that only Minnie can grasp, too. The point overall is that these two are just as different as they are two peas in a pod and perfect for each other on that inexplicably platonic, almost chemical level that we rarely see in the movies (indeed, it’s telling that the directors pay tribute to 1997’s Good Will Hunting, featuring perhaps another of cinema’s greatest pair of best friends in the characters played by Matt Damon and Ben Affleck). Coleman is so forceful in conveying how positive—and in entirely non-toxic way—her presence is that we cannot help but feel the conspicuousness of her absence once the car crash occurs, and Kupferer is just as much a born star, with absolutely no precociousness but layers of uncertainty and insecurity, both of which turn toward numbing grief and sardonic humor, that are almost too relatable in how real they are.
When Callie dies, then, it seems like those around her die a little, too—not necessarily beginning with Minnie (because there are the girl’s mother and father to factor in, too), but significantly about how the little death begins in Minnie’s brain and gradually spreads to her heart. As a character rather bluntly puts it here, Minnie must now mourn, not only Callie’s past and present, but the future she no longer has and in which Minnie can now no longer share. It’s no wonder that Minnie takes up the mantle of her late friend in the school’s year-end theater production, even when it becomes something very, very different.
As for Callie’s mother, it’s a testament to the movie’s range of emotional coverage that we pick up on smaller details—like how it was only the girl’s presence keeping her parents together—that now define Helen’s (Sophie Okonedo) life. She loses her only daughter and, within a matter of apparent weeks, her marriage, and Okonedo’s performance immediately loses the spark of life we briefly see before the film’s title appears. From then onward, Okonedo suggests a woman who now must shoulder a burden—literally speaking, almost, as her shoulders hunch and her head is not held quite as high.
Work must be done in the wake of unthinkable loss, but only Helen and Minnie seem to want to do any of it with any vim in their vigor: Helen pushes forward as a member of the parents association three months after the accident, despite no longer having a student at the school or, because of that, a dog in the fight. Minnie has always needed the voice lessons that were less crucial for Callie, and she seeks them from Helen, the one person in this whole town who understands or accepts her (Minnie’s own mother—played by the actress’s real-life one, Tara Mallen—is simply less capable or worried about proving that she is capable at all the jobs Helen has now lost). Homecoming must be held, and there is a moment where Helen simply watches a couple of students dance that might be enough to shatter the heart into a million pieces.
Elsewhere in the story, and simply by virtue of its design, more happens to Minnie outside the context—yet also, because of the gaping hole, informed by—the death of Callie. She tries to save that theater production from becoming a garish type of memorial in the clutches of a pair of classmates (played by Addisyn Grace Cain and Audrey Grace Marshall) who have been pretending to be Callie’s best friends and employs the help of the drama teacher Mr. Murdaugh (David Hyde Pierce) to get it back on track. Minnie also meets Kat (Iman Vellani), a pretty and naturally funny girl who understands a bit about grief herself, having lost a mother in a random accident overseas a year earlier.
Life moves on, because it must. Mouse, though devastating in its reach, is also ultimately hopeful, because its makers understand—and ensure that we do so, too—that, when we carry the weight of the loved ones we lose, we’re never alone in that walk.
Rating: **** (out of ****)
Leave a Reply