Long Day’s Journey Into Night (1962) - film review

Outwardly, the Tyrones are a typical middle class American family living in New London, Connecticut.  The year is 1912 and the father, James, looks back on his career as an actor with a mixture of pride and dismay.  His wife, Jeanne, has become withdrawn and has resumed her habit of taking morphine, which she began shortly after the birth of her second son, Edmund.  The oldest son, Jamie, has tried to follow in his father’s footsteps but, lacking the talent and enthusiasm needed to be a successful stage actor, he has taken to drinking heavily.  Meanwhile, Edmund has contracted tuberculosis and has to be sent away to a sanatorium if he is to stand a chance of surviving.  The family is riven with recrimination and guilt.  James’s stinginess is resented by both his wife and his sons, whilst James’s disappointment with his two sons is all too evident...

With its riveting performances and faultless mise-en-scène, this adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical play offers the most intense and harrowing of movie experiences.  This is the film that earned Katharine Hepburn her reputation as a great tragedian and allowed her to tackle far more demanding dramatic roles in the autumn of her career.  It is impossible to watch Hepburn in this film and not be moved to tears by the extraordinary pathos and tragic humanity that she brings to her role.  Ralph Richardson is no less impressive as Hepburn’s co-star, vividly conveying the torment of a man who regards his life as a failure and cannot prevent himself from blaming others, even those nearest to him, for this failure.  Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell are exemplary supports to these great performers, the latter’s innocence and wraith-like quality making an appropriate counterpoint to the earthiness and moral decrepitude of the other family members.

Although in its uncut (and recommended) version it runs to just under three hours, Long Day’s Journey Into Night never presents an opportunity for the spectator to get bored or distracted.  Once the film has taken hold of you (which it does very quickly), you are hooked, right until the very last shot.  Sidney Lumet’s minimalist direction, the claustrophobic sets and the atmospheric cinematography lend an aura of confinement and sterility that perflectly encapsulates the nature of the human drama being played out.  The protagonists are bound to one another in a web of mutual dependency and mutual loathing.  That they love one another is never in doubt, but there is also a dark and bitter resentment in each of their hearts that frequently manifests itself in tirades and gestures of cruellest acrimony.  This is the archetypal dysfunctional family, but we see far more than that.  Here are the bleak and dismal failings of the human condition, exposed to us like decaying flesh rotting in the hot summer sun.  As Dean Stockwell’s character puts it, we are such stuff as manure is made on, although we may like to think otherwise.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009


Sidney Lumet’s Long Day’s Journey into the Night (based on Eugene O’Neill’s play) is a film about family life - about a common destiny, how we cope with problems of personal relationships, how we treat one another inside our families, how the human soul becomes part of the family soul, and how our social life competes and coexists with our family obligations and commitments.

When, today, we watch the life of the Tyrone family in the beginning of 20th century, we are amazed at how much American family relations have changed after only one hundred years. Our main difference from the Tyrones is not how much we have developed in our ability to be wiser and kinder to people we love and live with.  The picture is, rather, the opposite - how much emotional sensitivity, mental manoeuvrability in adapting to each other, empathy and sympathy we have lost for these years of our country’s democratic development, and the major losses, it seems, happened during the last thirty years.

Watching Long Day’s… is an educational and a psycho-dramatic experience mobilizing our introspection and our ability to observe our emotional reactions (in comparison with that of the Tyrone family members) more objectively.  James, Mary and their two grown-up sons (Jamie and Edmund) are born in the very midst of traditional Christianity and, together with American culture are going through the process of secularization of worldview.  A father who was a famous Shakespearean actor still maintains a religious psychology (which Lumet analyses in detail), albeit one that is refracted by his exposition of the grace of serious art.  Mary, his wife, personifies aspect of religious psychology relating to martyrdom - she suffers for being a ’bad mother and wife’ but her self-judgment is severe because of the spiritual perfectionism of her worldview.  James and Mary’s sons try to rebel against religious authoritarianism - they personify correspondingly two aspects of post-religious spirituality, Jamie - its intellectual aspect, and Edmund - its artistic-mystical aspect.

While experiencing the film, we feel that we have to learn a lot from the beginning of the previous century, that our everyday communications with each other are cognitively flat, thin and emotionally narrow and petty in comparison with theirs.  Instead of honest arguments, as they had, we have premature ejaculations of clashes, frustrations and sulking. Instead of positive confrontations we choose people (to be with) by the principle of similarity, and we are isolated from the otherness of other people and of the world around.  Because Lumet concentrates on the psychological confrontations between characters and on the truths coming out of it, the film is very interesting to watch - our life today with all its distractions from our humanity by entertaining (consumerist) images of Hollywood blockbusters, TV soups of soaps and pop-singing is much more boring than they had way back then.

The acting of Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell is not just dramatic but poetic, not just truthful but gracious, and Katharine Hepburn’s Mary Tyrone is her best work on screen, while Ralph Richardson was able not only to open the heart of James Tyrone for the viewers but sharply depicted his psychological defences.

© Victor Enyutin (Seattle USA) 2012

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