Long Day’s Journey into Night has been a core of the theatrical canon since its 1956 debut. It won the Pulitzer Prize posthumously for its author, Eugene O’Neill, and has been in worldwide repertory ever since. The role of the mother, Mary Tyrone, is one of the best in the English language for an actress, and the complex family dynamic remains one of the most potent depictions of addiction, enablement, family ties and tragedy in art. Who would have thought something set in 1912 would know more about the horrors of drug misuse than most American art in the decades since?
This new adaption by acclaimed English theatre director Jonathan Kent had its UK premiere at the Glasgow Film Festival. Mr. Kent, who directed Jessica Lange to a Tony Award on Broadway in the role of Mary Tyrone in 2016, does not reinvent the wheel. Instead, what this adaptation does is a masterclass on how movies and plays differ. Onstage, the audience back in the cheap seats must be catered to, meaning there is less room for subtlety. Film can put the camera as close to someone as they choose, leaving plenty of room for microexpressions and complex, nuanced emotions to play out larger than life. This adaptation was filmed outside Dublin in 2022 and for a variety of reasons is only being brought to the screens now. It will be studied by theatre students for a very long time indeed for how the shading, contradictory feelings of this family are brought to life.
Screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire has slightly adapted the playscript, largely to remove dated theatrical references (although the admiration for Edwin Booth, the greatest stage actor of his generation but now largely remembered for what his son did to a president in a theatre in 1865, remains). Older son Jamie (Ben Foster) is also here a more ambiguous failure/alcoholic instead of someone who couldn’t achieve father James’ (Ed Harris) career heights. The action takes place in one single day in a large Connecticut summer home where the four Tyrones – for there is also a younger son, Edmund (the Northern Irish actor Colin Morgan, largely known for work in British television but who holds his own here) – live in comfortable splendor, with a chauffeur, a cook (Lesa Thurman) and a housemaid called Cathleen (Ericka Roe) to do for them. James’ career as a touring actor has provided them with that comfort but also a rootless existence, and his anxiety about money has cast a pall over the family’s entire lives.
But it is Mary (Ms. Lange) who rules the home with her moods. On this day those are worries about Edmund, who is waiting to hear if his racking cough is a bad summer cold or consumption (what we now know as tuberculosis). Meanwhile her husband and sons are vibrating with anxiety about her, as they know all the signs in Mary’s behaviour that indicate she is abusing morphine again. But they prefer to hope against hope. And yet Mary doesn’t touch the food Bridget cooks and Kathleen serves. She paces the house complaining about the noise from the local foghorn and the occasional traffic on the street outside. She snaps at Edmund for sneaking a whiskey, then reasons that as Jamie has watered it down a small glass won’t matter. She’s lovable and infuriating and exhausting and irritating and sympathetic and it would be sad, except you want to shake her.
This entire theatrical Irish-American family can spin on a dime between furious, decades-old grievance and the anguished, sincere concern only found in true love. The reason O’Neill’s script has survived this long is that it’s rare to see something so perfectly replicate a tense family gathering with multiple elephants in the room haunting every interaction. But the reason the script triumphs is because the threat to Edmund’s health has frayed everyone’s ability to cope on a day-to-day level. By the end of course it has snapped. Mark Wolf’s cinematography (especially the use of the sweeping lighthouse beams in the final sequence), Jon Harris’ editing and Ilan Eshkeri’s score center the work of the actors at all times, and Mr. Kent has a sharp eye for the telling moment in the shifting sands of the story.
Ms. Lange and Mr. Harris are so good here – their body of work, reputations and awards are wholly justified – that the only thing to say about their performances is how subtle their work is, and how exact. The way Ms. Lange uses her hands, the pain in which Mary uses as her excuse, is incredibly subtle work. Sometimes she uses them to deflect her feelings outward. Other times she uses them to reinforce and justify her feelings of being upset. She also notably never touches her own face with her fingers, only with the backs of her hands. Mr. Harris’ James is haunted, a peacock whose tailfeathers are gone but who still carries himself magnificently. He veers between heart-breaking dismay at his inability to solve anyone’s problems and indignant, performative righteousness when his sons suggest he easily could with his money. The ways in which this family have curdled are no one’s fault, but they have spent decades trying to figure out if it’s someone responsibility. Of course in a family the responsibility belongs to everybody.
Mr. Foster, who played the best Stanley Kowalski of recent memory on the London stage in 2014, has developed a fascinating and extremely watchable speciality. He is outstanding playing fundamentally decent but badly damaged men who are capable of both extraordinary kindness and extraordinary violence. The joy of watching him is the impossibility of guessing which way he will turn. It could be argued therefore that Jamie is the part he was born to play. The way in which Mr. Foster makes Jamie’s self-pity an act of monstrous aggression is utterly remarkable, as is how he sits in silence around his family as they argue, misery and compassion combined on his face. And Mr. Morgan, the least famous in this ensemble in the part which was Mr. O’Neill’s version of himself, more than holds his own. Edmund’s time at sea means he has been apart from this suffocating family dynamic, but he also has the impossible task trying to figure out how to survive the very people who are meant to help him survive. The subtle ways in which Mr. Morgan indicates how he has heard their songs before and loves them regardless of the pain they cause is really very special.
But family stories always belong to the mother, and Mr. Kent knows never to shift focus away from Ms. Lange for long. Her combination of seeming fragility and emotional volatility has served her very well over the course of her career, and the ways in which she finds the right points to press in her performance are just astonishing. At the GFF she and Mr. Harris spoke about how the movie had its original funding pulled after a single day of filming, but only the personal intervention of the late British producer Bill Kenwright led to the production being saved. The movie is dedicated to him in thanks. It feels somehow appropriate that a movie about the fragility of human joy in the face of human weakness was nearly never made. But these experts managed to do it expertly, and have given us a remarkable gift.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night recently screened at the Glasgow Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the Glasgow site for the title.
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