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A school shooting is such a cataclysmic event that any attempt to dramatize the aftermath of one is, by definition, a film to take seriously. That said, there’s a right way to make one of these. “Mass,” the 2021 Sundance drama in which four parents gathered in a church antechamber for a painfully cathartic encounter session (two of them were the parents of a victim; two were the parents of the shooter), was a movie that walked a delicate tightrope. It was compact and graceful, harrowing and illuminating.
“Eric LaRue,” directed by the actor Michael Shannon, is built around a similar situation, as it works its way toward a confrontation between the mother of a school shooter and the mothers of the three classmates he killed. But instead of tackling the matter at hand, almost every scene is weighed down by a free-floating and at times annoyingly intrusive indie-film attitude.
Take the scene in which Janice LaRue (Judy Greer), the mother of the shooter, returns to work at the hardware-and-knickknack store where she’s a floor clerk. Janice is so washed-out and depressed that she drifts around like the walking dead. (She’s been that way since the shooting took place, which we gather is around a year ago.) The store has a major section of guns for sale (handguns, rifles, you name it), and a customer (Jacob Alexander), showing a level of aggression that mostly seems a product of overly telegraphed screenwriting, asks Janice to help him out, even though she insists it’s not her department. Glancing at the guns, he says, “Which one of these would you recommend?” “For what?” she replies, finding his question…loaded. “Well, you know,” he says. “Whatever.” She’s understandably skittish, yet what’s front and center isn’t the emotion of the scene — it’s the awkward obviousness of it. Simply put, it’s so on-the-nose that it whiffs the reality test.
The same thing is true, in a different way, when Janice goes to visit her pastor, Steve Calhan, played by Paul Sparks with a weirdly overemphatic self-actualizing zeal. This clergyman thinks he’s God’s gift to life coaching, and the film never lets us forget it. His little pep talk does nothing to cheer Janice up, but the only reason it’s there in the first place is so that the movie can find a novel way to tweak Christian piety. There’s a fair amount of anticlerical snarking in “Eric LaRue.” Janice’s husband, Ron, is played as an unlikely hunched-over nerd by Alexander Skarsgård, and he’s a Jesus geek who seems to be living on a different planet from her.
Their emotional estrangement plays out in the fact that they now belong to different churches. She’s got the infomercial-worthy Pastor Steve at First Presbyterian, whereas Ron, over at Redeemer, is in thrall to pastor Bill Verne (Tracy Letts), who’s more of a cultish holy roller. Ron attends prayer meetings at Redeemer in the company of his office human-resources manager, played by Alison Pill as such a flirtatious cuddlebug (“Jesus loves hugs!” she says) that the film’s version of comedy is encouraging us to wonder when these two prayer-group buddies are going to get a room.
There’s some snarky comeuppance to the fact that when Ron tries to stand up to Janice and be a trad husband, she simply flicks him aside. (If the film took this battle more seriously, it might have generated some sparks.) Judy Greer, an actor I’ve long revered, shows you the anger simmering just under Janice’s sullen passivity, though I wish the character were conceived of as less of a humdrum “typical” Middle American drone. When Janice and Ron finally get down to talking about their son, Eric, and how he could have killed his classmates, even then the film barely finds a point of intimacy between them. “Jesus was with him!” says Ron. And when Janice points out that Eric, after the shooting, came back home and watched TV on the couch, Ron says, “Jesus was with him then, too!”
We keep hoping that maybe, when “Eric LaRue” gets to the parental summit meeting of agony and rage it keeps talking about, it will settle down into something cogent and authentic. Instead, when Janice and two of the mothers finally meet, the emphasis is not on their words. It’s on what a therapeutic control freak Pastor Steve is, always interrupting with thoughts like, “Apologies don’t create discussions. They end them.” The script is by the playwright Brett Neveau, who based it on his 2002 stage play, but what on earth possessed Michael Shannon to stage this scene with three parents, dealing with the definition of an impossible situation, and to keep focusing on…the flyweight narcissist pastor? And where, by the way, are the victims’ fathers? It’s so weird that they’re never even mentioned.
The real climax comes after this, when Janice goes to visit Eric in prison. (It’s the first time she’s done so.) As Eric, the actor Nation Sage Henrikson has got a surly, deep-voiced Ashton Kutcher-as-Norman Bates thing going on. After Eric spends a few minutes intelligently describing prison conditions, Janice says, tearfully, “I’ve been having a very hard time.” And Eric says, with accusatory coldness, “That’s a weird thing to say to somebody in prison.” Maybe so, but that’s an arrogant thing for such a young killer to say.
Eric claims to be remorseful, and makes a big point of it. But he doesn’t say it…remorsefully. “Things got out of control in my mind,” he says, “and I screwed up.” But that explains nothing. By the time Janice says, “I understand why you did it…Those women are hateful, awful women and their children were hateful, awful children,” we recognize what’s going on — that she’s trying to go all the way into a kind of empathy for him — but at the same time it just sounds like the movie has gone off the rails. A school-shooting drama needn’t be any one specific thing, but to ask an audience to sit through one is, implicitly, to promise some wrenching insight in return. “Eric LaRue” is just a lot of indie showboating signifying nothing.
