There’s also an aspect of listening in Michael Shannon’s “Eric LaRue,” a film that will likely draw comparisons to “Mass” when it’s released. An adaptation of a stage play written post-Columbine by Brett Neveu in 2002, “Eric LaRue” remains depressingly timely, although one of its strengths is that it never feels like it’s trying to be a broad statement about high school shootings. It’s a character study about a mother and father who want to heal, grieve, and even find faith in very different ways after their son does the unimaginable. The final conversation is overly scripted and strikes a few false chords, but I really admired this film in its subtle, quieter moments, carefully drawing two complex characters and letting a pair of excellent performers fully embody them.
The long-underrated Judy Greer gives her most dramatic role to date as Janice, the mother of Eric LaRue, a boy who, grown tired of the bullying his life, took a gun to high school and shot three of his classmates. She seems almost in a daze, unable to move from Point A to Point B. Who could blame her? Some situations in which Janice finds herself are a bit too manufactured—a customer insists she sell him a gun on her fast day back at work, for example—but I found Greer heartbreaking in her silence, able to convey a woman whose roadmap was torn up. She’s lost and directionless, unsure of the local pastor (Paul Sparks), who insists she meet with the mothers of the children that her son murdered.
While Janice struggles with the role of faith and forgiveness, her husband Ron (Alexander Skarsgard) pushes strong in the other direction, finding peace at a new church led by an engaging figure played by Tracy Letts. Another parishioner there is played by Alison Pill, who becomes such a support structure for Ron that she begins to represent temptation. While Janice seems almost to want to exist in her grief, to carry her burdens with her, Ron is seeking a way to shed them, the classic representation of Jesus as the way to remove that weight. It’s a fascinating dissection of how two people, especially a mother and father, can respond to something so horrific differently.