As nearly as I can tell, Dancing at Lughnasa is meant to be a heartwarming portrait of life in a small Irish village in a time of profound social and economic change. Unfortunately, it has no heart and no capacity for warmth and fails to take or create an interest in change or stasis or even itself. It’s hokey and contrived and stupid and ultimately pointless—a series of character sketches of people who manage, despite all odds, to remain one-dimensional until the final credits finally roll.
Although it has become unthinkable, in intellectually fashionable circles, to confess that one finds Our Town to be little more than a heaping helping of bittersweet contrivance—although it has become unthinkable to espouse such a position, one cannot help wishing that Thornton Wilder had never been born, particularly when one encounters material so shamelessly and unimaginatively derived from Our Town as Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa.
When I visited Ireland a few years ago, I had the distinct displeasure of seeing Friel’s play performed at the Abbey Theater in Dublin (the one Yeats helped to found). The only interesting thing about the play was that the narrator actually walked onto the stage and talked without any of the other characters seeming to notice him. In the film, the narrator’s role has been significantly reduced. His voiceovers are just like all the other voiceovers that we’re accustomed to encountering in films with narrators: although infused with a painfully wrongheaded desire to be wistful and poignant, they’re rarely anything more than clunky and maudlin.
I don’t mean to suggest that the way the narrator was used in the play was particularly satisfying or even very inventive, but it did provide an otherwise unengaging story with a kind of vaguely redeeming quirkiness. O’Connor seems to have realized that such quirkiness was unnecessary to a film in which he could present his viewers with long and loving shots of the Irish countryside, but he failed to notice that the story he is obliged to tell us is unrelentingly formulaic on its way to an offensively worthless conclusion.
Because the final shot that the film gives us is an overt homage to Addie Bundren’s notions about language in As I Lay Dying, I would very much like to be able to say kind things about the film. We see a kite sail into the heavens as the narrator intones, “Dancing as if language no longer existed because words were no longer necessary.” Between the narrative and the image of the kite, we have to give O’Connor credit for attempting to put a light-hearted spin on Addie’s indictment of language:
I would think how words go straight up in a thin line, quick and harmless, and how terribly doing goes along the earth, clinging to it, so that after a while the two lines are too far apart for the same person to straddle from one to the other . . .
But that is all that we can give O’Connor credit for. The rest of the film does nothing to support this position. It does nothing but demonstrate how little imagination people want to see in their dramas these days. In the course of Dancing at Lughnasa, Friel presents us with five sisters who manage to make up the most uninteresting family in the history of humanity. Meryl Streep plays Kate, the bossy one; Catherine McCormick plays Christina, the pretty one; Sophie Thompson plays Rose, the dimwitted one; Brid Brennan plays Agnes, the quiet one; and Kathy Burke plays Maggie, the fun-loving one. The cast is rounded out by characters who are every bit as depthless as the sisters: a priest who is crazy, a lothario who knows how to dance, and a young boy who is—get ready for this—frightened and confused by the world, but curious about it too.
The crazy priest, Father Jack Mundy (Michael Gambon), has just returned from a lifetime of missionary work in Africa. He has a hard time readjusting to life in his prim and proper Irish village because—as we are made to understand over and over and over again and yet again—Africans know how to part-ay! Civilization and Christianity are killing our souls; what we need is a pagan form of release. Bacchanalias are essential to our psychic health, yada yada yada. But when the five Mundy sisters finally succumb to their need to dance, they don’t quite descend upon a random male in a sexual frenzy that leaves him torn to pieces. Instead, Maggie throws a pinch of flour into the air before the women saunter outdoors to exhaust themselves in a two-minute jig. (The outdoor shot is beautiful, but it loses the intensity and spontaneity of having the women dance in their kitchen, as they did in the stage production I saw.)
Dancing at Lughnasa is essentially a Bacchanalia for prigs. It is a story of women struggling to suppress their sexuality while the dashing (but completely non-threatening) Gerry Evans (Rhys Ifans) sleeps in the barn outside their house. Evans is supposed to be the wanderlust figure, but he is a frightened little girl’s notion of the wanderer. He rides around on a motorcycle in a splendid leather jacket that is miraculously neither scratched not stained nor even coated with dust. He is a knight in shining armor whose horse never has to defecate.
As for the action of the film, it’s really nothing more than the characters living up to their labels in one scene after another. The quiet sister says very little; the fun-loving sister smokes and dances; the bossy sister bosses the others around; the dumb sister does dumb things; and the pretty sister says even less than the quiet sister and is only pretty by comparison. There is a crude little b*tch in a store who acts like a crude little b*tch and is then labeled a “crude little b*tch” by another character in the film. Then there’s a scene in which Kate acts like a damned righteous b*tch, which prompts the pretty one to call her a “damned righteous b*tch.” Those of you who like to pigeonhole people under single characteristics can hone your abilities as you watch the film. See what you make of the characters before the film tells you what to make of them. You’re practically guaranteed a score of 100%—provided you can stay awake.
A young boy tells the story of growing up in a fatherless home with his unmarried mother and four spinster aunts in 1930's Ireland. Their lives are in...More at Family Video
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