What can be done with the anger that tragedy bears? Brett Neveu wrote Eric LaRue for the stage in the wake of the Columbine massacre, when mass shootings at U.S. schools felt like something of an unspeakable novelty. Neveu’s play, which follows a mother named Janice in the months after her son shot and killed three of his classmates, was bleary in the face of an open wound, a beleaguered admission that there was no making sense of all this. By the time Michael Shannon’s screen adaptation of Eric LaRue found wide distribution, the Washington Post estimated that the country had suffered another 428 school shootings since the tragedy that first inspired Neveu’s script. The movie, Shannon’s directorial debut, finds the dizzy fury of its source material curdled by inevitability; if it buckles under the weight of its own impossible gambit, it remains dogged in its commitment to sit in the pain so often rendered dull by the recurrence of a national nightmare.
Shannon’s Eric LaRue casts Judy Greer as Janice, who’s facing an uncomfortable proposition: Steve (Paul Sparks), a pastor at the Presbyterian church Janice joined after her son’s killings, has asked her to meet with the mothers of the murdered children in hopes that it might serve as a healing moment for everyone involved. Those plans are complicated by Janice’s husband, Ron (Alexander Skarsgård), who has joined a different church — the evangelical Redeemer, whose fervent severity burns in stark relief to the relatively placid Presbyterian pulpit — and wants to see this meeting of mothers happen on his own congregation’s turf. Eric LaRue doesn’t posit Christian faith as a prerequisite to healing as much as it accepts it as America’s only consistent consolation toward gun violence, and the movie’s tensions — between warring dogmas, husband and wife, the parents of those killed and the parents of the killer — seethe and often choke on the ensuing frustration.
The church bears the brunt of Eric LaRue’s ire, and while neither denomination comes out clean, that anger is pointed decidedly toward Ron’s evangelical Redeemer church. That’s not without due cause. Evangelical Christianity has been a key player in the rise of far-right ideology and maintains an all but official partnership with the NRA; The New Yorker has reported on the NRA’s patterns of donations to evangelical organizations, and Christianity Today estimates that two-fifths of white evangelical Americans own a gun, one-fourth of whom hold NRA memberships.
Bitterness is accordingly woven into every inch of Redeemer’s fabric. Ron practices the bullheaded, unstudied zeal of a born-again wino or Sunday school toddler; it couples with Skarsgård’s slapstick physicality to generate punchlines at a clip that makes it easy to forget that he’s grieving, too. His fellow congregants share his manic ardor, lifting hands and speaking in tongues as they circle Redeemer’s head pastor, Bill Verne (Tracy Letts). Verne quakes with the southern menace of a lurching Baptist preacher, towering over his congregation on the shoulders of antiquated morality. Redemption might be the mission of Ron’s church, but its seams are glued with fear and cruelty.
In the shadow of Redeemer’s looming ferocity, Pastor Steve and the Presbyterian church’s pratfall theology functions as something of a dogmatic Yin. Steve is a goof, his well-meaning but ill-conceived swings toward absolution springing from under his feet to smack his nose like so many rakes. He sweats at the first sign of discomfort and cowers at Janice’s welling tears; at one point, he cuts an argument between Janice and the mothers of the slain boys short because of an issue with a babysitter at home. Eric LaRue’s gentler hand toward the Presbyterian church comes as a welcome relief to the bitter parody it finds in evangelicalism, but it also exposes the ways in which animosity blurs the film’s focus. Its anger is just — even occasionally refreshing — but when it can’t land a punch, it settles for a punchline, and the movie struggles to align its sense of humor with the depths it (admirably) treads. Eric LaRue’s jokes stall and sputter at their best, but more often paint a caricature of grief that betrays the righteousness of the indignation it holds toward American Christianity. The severity of the darkness that surrounds school shootings likely offers no chance for catharsis; accordingly, Shannon’s shots toward levity stumble like a drunken boxer.
Still, Eric LaRue retains firm footing in the caliber of its performers and the sincerity of the pain that ripples around its central tragedy. Neveu’s play debuted at Chicago’s Red Orchid Theatre, and the writer and Shannon preserve the intimacy of that small stage within the film’s dialogue, which fills the room so completely you might feel your back press against the wall. The cast comprises seasoned character actors who make easy work of navigating the script’s thorny dispositions; for all the movie’s fumbled animosity toward its dueling churches, Paul Sparks and Tracy Letts command either side of modern Christianity’s problematic coin as if they were raised in the cloth themselves. Skarsgård too supersedes his limp punchlines to bring some dignity to those clawing their way toward faith in the dark, and the near emotional affair at which he arrives with a member of Redeemer (Allison Pill) is a cutting indictment of a puritanical culture’s paradoxical transgressions of its own values.
With Janice, though, Judy Greer runs away with Eric LaRue’s MVP title. In a career of formidable scene-stealers, Greer’s turn as a mother choked blind by a cocktail of grief and guilt makes the case that the actor deserved first billing by her first credit. Greer accepts that the tragedy Janice endures renders her less of a grieving mother than a mother erased, and she treads LaRue’s sets like a hungry ghost, smoking cigarettes with shaking hands and haunting shadows for fear of who she was when there was light. It culminates in a scene that borders on the radical, and by way of Greer’s performance, the movie is able to transcend the limits of grief narratives and therapeutic frameworks to unearth something almost animal: a cruel, bewildered, and wild reckoning with fate. Eric LaRue is a woozy movie that remains noble in its conclusion that healing is a miracle — and its reluctant admission that miracles likely don’t exist.
DIRECTOR: Michael Shannon; CAST: Judy Greer, Alexander Skarsgård, Allison Pill, Tracy Letts; DISTRIBUTOR: Magnolia Pictures; IN THEATERS: April 4; STREAMING: April 11; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 59 min.
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