Directed by Sidney Lumet
Review by Kevin Murphy
If the ways of the world have turned you sour, take heart you’re not a member of the Tyrone family. Based largely on personal experience, Eugene O’Neill’s play chronicles a fateful day in which a family’s resentment, jealousy, heartache and occasional solace morphs from idle concern into oppressive vigilance.
The Tyrone’s are a dramatic bunch. A theatrical man knocks up an emotional woman. Together they rear two boys. Later, their sons’ recriminations find form in Shakespearean soliloquies and bursts of alcoholic outrage.
Edmond (Dean Stockwell) worries a reemergence of his mother’s morphine habit will coincide with his own misfortune: he’s developed consumption.
His older brother Jaime, played with charm and brutality by Jason Robards, loafs at the house, partaking in a breeze of yardwork until it’s time to ante up to the whiskey bottle. Jaime could have been a great actor, just as his father claims he could have been, had things turned out differently. In Jaime’s case, his laziness and veneer of superiority dash any hopes for personal achievement.
With Papa Tyrone, well, who can really say? Those by-gone days, raising a family on the road, shifting from hotel to hotel, remain edged in his heart, jabbing his remorse and vanity with damnable consistency.
Mary Tyrone (Katherine Hepburn) is the wild horse of this barn. She’s a beauty to be sure, and her family trips on each of her words. But she is disturbed to the point of lunacy. Harboring a delicious habit of morphine and spite, Hepburn stirs like a frantic ghost, dominating scenes with a rattling performance that’s become as much a prerequisite for junkie art as Burroughs’ influence on syringe literature.
Not that Hepburn steals the entire show. Each performance is rigid; the cast slips into the lives of a fractured family struggling to survive one hellish summer day.
Moving from argument to acquiescence to despair and finally to absolution, the Tyrone’s beget an unspeakable honesty with long-winded diatribes, flamed from the bottom of their burning hearts.
And it’s probably just as O’Neill wished.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is considered O’Neill’s masterpiece. Given the autobiographical nature, it’s no wonder the playwright ordered the manuscript sheltered until 25 years had passed his death.
But drama has a way of plucking from the grave. If a tale’s to be told, an ambitious director will scoop it up. In this case it was Sidney Lumet.
His portrayal is devastating as an apt homage to the play’s exquisite torture. He finds his stride in the deep, smoky shots of an encroaching afternoon. The clouds gather, the foghorn blows, Mary Tyrone unravels; Lumet captures the evolving despair like an observant visitor staying with his crazy cousins for the weekend.
If you consider the length and success of his career, Lumet seems to have found comfort and escape documenting the crumbling lives of families.
His 2007 film, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, follows two brothers’ downward spiral. After concocting a plan to rip off their parents’ jewelry store, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke disrupt the laws of trust with heartless agility.
For Lumet, his latest release solidifies his placement as a chronicler of families gone wrong.
Think of him, framed in a photograph: poised on a dusty mantle, he oversees the empty spaces of deserted houses, houses left alone in the wake of domestic banishment.
