DANCING AT LUGHNASA
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D.
Director: Pat O'Connor Writer: Brian Friel (play), Frank McGuinness Cast: Meryl Streep, Michael Gambon, Catherine McCormack, Kathy Burke, Sophie Thompson, Brid Brennan, Rhys Ifans, Darrell Johnston, Lorcan Cranitch, Peter Gowen, Dawn Bradfield, Marie Mullen, John Kavanagh, Katherine O'Toole
Recent films like "Pleasantville," "Waking Ned Devine," and "The Truman Show" convey the spirit of small-town life, all executed quite well with original ideas, creative expression, and satiric impact. But however intelligent they are, none bears the depth of character, the simultaneously earthy and mystical, romantic and hard-scrabble intensity of "Dancing at Lughnasa." Successfully made into a film from Brian Friel's notable play by director Pat O'Connor, "Dancing at Lughnasa" is now opened up, creating variety to the primarily verbal exchanges that took place on stages from the Abbey to Broadway some years back. Movies like this one make me realize still again why I gave up going to theater in favor of focusing on the cinema. How else but in photographer Kenneth MacMillan's camerawork could we marvel at the elegant framing device, which highlights a lad of eight years flying a kite which is illustrated with a countenance at once Celtic and pagan, letting his plaything glide optimistically into the sky, then tripping ominously and losing his hold on the trinket? Nor could staging, however shrewd, transport us to the craggy hills of the Emerald Isle, knolls over which a young lover would arrive unexpectedly by motorcycle and beyond which a rickety bus would carry home a lost old man ejected from service to lepers in Africa.
Rich in language as you'd expect from the writer of such works as "Philadelphia, Here I Come" and "A Month in the Country," Brian Friel's autobiographical tale is notable for capturing the ambiance of a particular time and place. More important, though, it celebrates the fortitude of five women, sisters who have lived together, all unmarried, in a land suffering from a dire shortage of eligible men. Through an potent analysis of their dissimilar characters, Frank McGuinness, who has adapted Mr. Friel's play to the screen, portrays a hardy bunch, often acquitting themselves as a quincunx of quidnuncs, who skirmish and forgive one another, following each minor tempest with a steaming cup of bracing tea. The story is narrated by Michael, a love child of one of the sisters, who looks back some years after a fateful summer of 1936 when things irrevocably changed for the family.
The title comes from the feast day honoring Lugh, the pagan god of music and light, a fellow whose renown bring forth a Dionysian gambol in the back hills of a small town in Donegal. During the feast of Lughnasa men and women dance about a fire, the men not unfriendly to the bottle occasionally dashing across the flames. The five Mundy sisters who have brought up the illegitimate Michael, son of Christina (Catherine Mc Cormack) and her lover Gerry Evans (Rhys Ifans), can barely piece together a living, sustained largely by the small salary brought home by the family's guide, schoolteacher Kate (Meryl Streep). Two others bring home handiwork, making gloves for the sale in the town, but all are determined to find what happiness they can in what must seem to modern, urban denizens as an awfully grim existence.
Perhaps psychologists can have a field day analyzing how these women, presumably inheriting similar genes and carrying on their tasks in the same, circumscribed environment, could vary so much. Rose (Sophie Thompson) is simple-minded and bonds most closely with Agnes (Brid Brennan), who sees Rose as the child she has longed to have. Christina, the most attractive of the bunch, pines for her wandering boy friend, who motors through the village periodically and unexpectedly. Kate, known to some as a "righteous bitch" and who, in one point of genuine insight agrees with the harsh verdict, disapproves of pagan rituals and is appalled by dancing, especially if engaged in by "mature ladies"--which she considers her hardy band of women. Perhaps the most involving character is Father Jack Mundy (Michael Gambon), an all-but-defrocked priest, who has spent most of his career in Uganda with the aim of teaching Christianity but who has come back converted to paganism by the African people he has grown to love.
Director O'Connor has easily fulfilled what must have been his principal aim--to make a staged work with all the blocking and other conventions that the theater entails into a drama of cinematic interest. The linguistic richness comes across, words spoke with a variety of fascinating Irish accents which American actress Meryl Streep manages to maintain throughout, utterances which unfold the passions and unfulfilled dreams of the five women and the three men who have come into their lives. The muted nature of the enterprise makes one particular burst of passion all the more electrifying, as the old, shoddy radio they have named Marconi comes to life with lilting music bringing the five women to their feet in a explosion of dance.
Gerald McSorley's narration brings a special poignancy to the proceedings in an ensemble piece made particularly trenchant by Michael Gambon as a befuddled priest whose long affiliation with a people far different from him endows him with a humanity scarcely approached by the others of his clan.
Rated PG. Running Time: 94 minutes.(C) 1998 Harvey Karten
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