In telling a touching, cleareyed tale of young death, grief and connection, Kelly O’Sullivan and Alex Thompson’s third collaboration, “Mouse,” reminds us how personal — yet shared — loss can feel.
“Mouse” opens in North Little Rock, Ark., on the last night of junior year for Callie (Chloe Coleman) and her best friend, Minnie (Katherine Mallen Kupferer). The discrepancy between the friends is a sign. Compared with Callie, an effervescent, theater kid beauty, Minnie is a tad mousy. The only child of a seemingly perfect couple, Callie is the kind of teenager other students claim as their best friend, too.
On a bright morning, a runner asks Minnie, barely breaking his stride, if she’s friends with Callie. When she says yes, he offers an apology that, although vague, has Minnie hurrying toward Callie’s house, where we’ll be reminded that adults aren’t much better in navigating the awkward etiquette of unexpected loss. (The film is set in 2002, so the lightning speed of social media isn’t yet part of the equation.)
The actor Sophie Okonedo embodies the quiet anguish of Helen Bell, Callie’s bereaved mother. When Helen and her husband, Mark (Christopher R. Ellis), arrive home to a phalanx of friends and neighbors, she musters an ache of recognition as she passes Minnie. When Helen next runs into the teenager, at a store before school begins, her smile is momentarily incandescent even as her posture remains wounded.
Minnie and Helen draw closer. Some of the moments in their budding friendship are especially sad, some of them dear, all of them are a mixture of deep heartache and fragile recovery. Sullivan and Thompson (“Saint Frances” and “Ghostlight”) have a gift for braiding intergenerational story lines. They’ve reunited with a crew that makes the intimacy feel true and understated.
As Minnie and Helen spend more time together, Minnie pulls further away from her mother, Barbara (Tara Mallen), who is a mess. Or so Minnie’s sullen judgments might have us believe of the single mother who works at a veterinary clinic and who, in addition to a household of animals, has taken in a cheery toddler after he was abandoned. “I guess he’s stuck with her now, poor kid,” Minnie quips to Helen. Helen doesn’t bite. We won’t either. While Barbara and Helen are nothing alike, the filmmakers refuse to pit the two women against each other. And we’ve seen Barbara in loving if harried action when she overhears — and pretends with sweet fluster to have not — Minnie’s wee conversation with her new friend Kat (Iman Vellani), who knows a thing or two about bereavement.
“Mouse” leaves it to the high school’s drama teacher (a rightly measured David Hyde Pierce) to offer wise words to Minnie as well as her other grieving classmates. When the senior cabaret show — dedicated to Callie’s memory — arrives, a pas de deux, by two of Callie’s not exactly likable friends, is unexpected. Defying cliché, so is Minnie’s performance. It’s just a glimpse into how this “Mouse” imparts sweet but never cloying lessons about the different ways the bereaved continue on.
Mouse Rated R for language, some sexual references and teen drinking. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters.
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