Irish filmmaker Cathal Black, known for making movies that fluidly mix fact and fiction, documentary tropes and dramatic technique, has maybe found his ultimate subject in Thomas Lynch. Lynch, who describes himself in Black’s Learning Gravity as “a father, a husband, an undertaker,” is also a renowned poet and essayist whose writings inspired Alan Ball to create his HBO series, Six Feet Under. In the film, Lynch says his poetry grew out of a desire to “leave a record” for his children of what was going on in his head while he appeared to be “staring at your ear, preoccupied.” Poetry, he says, is his way of making his subjective interpretation of his life, work and family into something concrete, an “effort to act out in language those most unspeakable feelings.” It’s a philosophy and practice tailor made for Black’s hybrid style.
Moving from ruminations on the family business to Lynch’s personal confessions and back again, Gravity’s heavily stylized dramatizations are built around Lynch’s poems, which the author reads aloud. He appears in the film as himself, but he’s also played in some scenes by the slightly younger, trimmer Gary Hetzler. Lynch’s calm, measured voice, with just a hint of an accent (he indentifies himself as Irish-American, and his stories take place mostly in Michigan and on the Irish coast), support Black’s eerie, occasionally surreal images. There’s a lot here that brings to mind Gregory Crewdson, the contemporary photographer whose work so reliably inserts a sense of the supernatural into the everyday suburban. (Coincidentally or not, Crewdson photographed a promo campaign for Six Feet Under in 2003.)
Both Black’s visual style and Lynch’s unflappable narration help to temper the inherent quirk value to some of the stories (the couplet about the lady who though better of putting an ash-filled urn in the trunk and instead buckled it into the passenger seat; the corpse who tells his story as he’s being outfitted for the open casket), but the film gets its real weight from Lynch’s revelations on the inner lives of those who work in death. He describes learning the trade from his father as a teenager, and keeping himself busy with little details of preparing the corpse of a crime victim so as not to think about “evil.” As he ages, he gives up alcohol because he’s worried that his young son “fears” the man he turns into when he drinks, but finds relief in the renewed emotional sensations of sobriety, ultimately feeling “thankful” for the pain brought by his own parents’ death. If Learning Gravity has a fatal flaw, it’s that Black’s impeccable visuals rarely match that kind of visceral impact. It’s all so smooth and dream-like like sometimes it’s impossible to feel it.
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