Cynical Cinema

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is a new DVD out tomorrow, May 13th, from Alliance Films. It’s not so much a movie as it is a stage play filmed like one. It’s an old 1996 staging of the Eugene O’Neill play from the Stratford Festival, directed by David Wellington and starring William Hutt, Martha Henry, Tom McCumus, Peter Donaldson, and Martha Burns. It’s the tragic and compelling story of an Irish-American family coming apart at the seams. The mother is a morphine addict, the father is a cheapskate and a drunk, one of the brothers is a degenerate alcoholic, and the other has just been diagnosed with consumption. Although this sounds like the basis of a fine and hilarious family comedy, Long Day’s Journey Into Night is anything but funny. It’s moving, it’s dramatic, but it is far from hilarious.

And perhaps it could use a little hilarity. This film is three hours long. And without some break in the drama, it starts to feel fairly monotonous at about the one-hour mark. The performances are all excellent, but they are stage-play excellent, which for film feels a lot like over-acting, in particular the scenes between the brother with consumption and his father. Over a game of cards, the dialogue gets heated, then slows to a lull, then explodes again, then fades away. I imagine that if bipolar disease is something that can be caught, this scene could give it to you. This is a wonderful play, and a great story with some super dialogue, but it seems unnecessary. Why bother putting it on film, when the entire thing happens basically within one room, and there is virtually no action at all. It ends up being three hours of talking. Interesting, intelligent talking, mind you, but still just talking. So to whom does this appeal?

I think, in the end, that this movie was put on DVD for a select few people. The theatre afficionados who can’t get out to Stratford for the big event, and the people who don’t get out to the theatre as often as they would like. So this might well fill the gap. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is one of the best-loved plays of the 20th century, but it does not make for a great movie. One hour of talking could work. Three hours is painful.