“You work hard at your job. You try to keep your home together. You perform your duties as best you can because you believe in responsibilities and good order. And then suddenly you realize there are cracks appearing everywhere, the control is slipping away, and that the whole thing is so fragile it can’t be held together much longer.”
The scene is Ballybeg, Co. Donegal in 1936, and schoolteacher Kate Mundy has just learned she has lost her job, the only regular source of income in the house she shares with four sisters and one young boy. Having kept the news from her sisters as long as possible, a series of crises finally brings her to disclose the fears and worries that she, as the lynch-pin of the family, has worked so hard to contain. But there is no cathartic explosion of passions, no great emotional bloodletting. When she finally does so, the outwardly resolute, inwardly fragile Kate communicates her anxieties softly and without histrionics.
In Brian Friel’s play Dancing at Lughnasa it’s an intimate moment that resounds with an empathy that lifts character and scene beyond a specific location into near-universal application; as such, it is characteristic of the power that turned the work into probably the single most successful Irish drama of the 1990s. That Pat O’Connor’s elegiac new film version of Dancing at Lughnasa attains the same impact as the Tony-winning stage production is an accomplishment of no small degree. That it manages to do so while opening out the stage work and without sacrificing the original’s intimacy, truth and poignancy to the demands of a big-budget film is nothing short of a triumph.
Produced by Noel Pearson, whose Oscar-winning My Left Foot helped spark the renaissance in Irish film that began in the 1980s, and adapted for the screen by Frank McGuinness, himself a respected Irish play-wright, Dancing at Lughnasa focuses on five women whose lives are changed forever by the events of a single summer. The Mundy sisters are five unmarried women leading ordinary, dull lives in the town of Ballybeg, County Donegal.
Played by Meryl Streep, Kate is the eldest, and the matriarch of the family. She rules the house, but with an authority that comes more from respect and respectability than from deference for the sake of it. As vulnerable on the inside as she is uncompromising on the outside, she is only gradually learning to recognize her own faults, chief among them her tendency to self-righteousness.
A Hollywood icon, Streep is billed as the star, but does not assume a starting role. As it was on the stage, the screen version of Lughnasa is an ensemble piece, and to her credit, Streep is content to play as just one part of what rams out to be a remarkable quintet. Her sisters are played by Brid Brennan, as the courageously practical Agnes, a reprise of the role which garnered her a Tony on Broadway; Kathy Burke as the good-humored Maggie; Catherine McCormack as Christina, young mother of a pre-teen boy; and Sophie Thompson as the childlike but savvy Rose.
Into the relatively safe and simple life of the five sisters comes Father Jack (Michael Gambon), the priest brother who has been a missionary in Africa for 25 years. Aging, confused, and given to singing the praises of paganism, the arrival of the old priest into their home marks the beginning of an irrevocable change for the Mundy sisters. Occupancy of the old family house is further swelled with the unexpected arrival of Gerry (Rhys Ifans), the wayward father of Christina’s son. He is biding his time before joining the International Brigade in the anti-Franco uprising in Spain, but his happy-go-lucky manner and a resurrected relationship with Christina make all five women consider their lives and the cruel and family-destroying realities of economic necessity.
The film hinges on the threat to the Mundys’ self-sufficiency, but it is character and mood, and not plot, that is the main concern.
Nevertheless, Lughnasa climaxes with a scene of quiet power and heartfelt passion that is unlikely to be equaled in any movie this year, from any country. The departure of two sisters into the Donegal night, effectively the break-up of the family, is handled almost offhandedly by O’Connor, but is all the more gut-wrenching because of it. Indeed, it is O’Connor’s ability to underline the pathos without withdrawing into sentimentality, along with his capacity for creating characters as living, breathing people, that makes a film so seeped in melancholy a painful joy to watch.
But while reality bites hard, there are moments of pure exuberance and joy. The central scene in Friel’s play saw the five sisters break spontaneously into dance in their home in a liberating flash of emotion and affirmation. O’Connor has the wherewithal to take the dance outside the house into the blazing evening sunlight, and does so in a thrilling, life-affirming sequence that is surely one of the greatest scenes ever filmed in Ireland. Pat O’Connor has always found in a small canvas the truths that shade and color the big picture, and his breathtaking, fully-formed vision of the joy still beating at the heart of a family in crisis by itself puts Dancing at Lughnasa in a league apart from the majority of Irish movies of the past couple of years.
But above all, it is the ensemble acting that drives the film. Although the Academy doesn’t often recognize the work of actors in ensemble pieces, every one of the five female leads deserves some form of recognition for superb work. Meryl Streep, in the best role she has had in years, delivers a performance of exemplary grace, and Sophie Thompson’s Rosie is heartbreakingly well played. But if any single actor from the film is to receive the imprimatur of the Academy Awards it should be Michael Gambon, who is almost impossibly good as the saddened and beaten Father Jack.
Kudos too to Pat O’Connor’s production team, who capture the bleak beauty as well as the deadening heartlessness of life and landscape in pre-war Donegal. Misty Irish mountains have rarely looked as broodingly attractive, but this is no mere postcard-friendly production. Nor is its intent to present itself as a filmed commemoration of things past for a world currently hungry for all things Irish. Friel’s play is an uncompromisingly sad meditation on family, particularly women, under fire from unstoppable change. A mesmerizing, impeccably well-made and acted slice of poignancy, Pat O’Connor’ s superb Dancing at Lughnasa will be seen as the play’s equal in all respects.
Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in the November/December 1998 issue of Irish America. ⬥
Leave a Reply