Sidney Lumet's Long Day's Journey into Night is a straightforward stage-to-screen transcription of Eugene O'Neill's exhaustive delineation of family life in the l9l0s. Regarded as O'Neill's masterpiece, this thick, disquieting and intimate piece abides on Broadway and in regional theater, with every actor and actress scrapping to play one of the remarkably baroque roles. In this version, Katharine Hepburn plays Mary Tyrone, the morphine-addicted wife-mother, Ralph Richardson is her authoritarian, egotistic actor husband, Dean Stockwell is the young son Edmund dying of TB, and Jason Robards as the alcoholic son Jamie. Unlike a lot of American films based on stage plays, this adaptation is absolutely filmic owing to a turning-point undertaking by director of photography Boris Kaufman, whose consummate camera movements lighting compositions focus our attention on every telling action and word of dialogue. Flaunting four overwhelming performances (five if you count the fleeting maid), this is ensemble acting at its very best.
And so what is the theme here? What does it mean? Well
who knows? Sometimes a story comes along, expressed in a way that is so enormous, so all-encompassing, that no single theme or meaning can define it. Trying to conclusively characterize it confines something that must afford the greatest extent of whatever a given actor's, or a given viewer's, interpretation. Lumet's approach is not to direct the script, but to let the script direct him. A director who is considered great would've been determined to control it, to put his stamp on it, but true, absolute confidence in the skill of a director is the ability to allow oneself to trust everything and everyone around him. Lumet may have been below the radar compared to his generation's other star "auteurs," but there is no denying his clear and precise sense of economy has produced intense dramatic work.
Usually, the uncertainty in the honorability or detestability of a character acts as the source of exploring each of them in deeper penetration, because a good writer, a good director, a good actor, ideally any given one of us, understands that each person is like us all. But in Long Day's Journey Into Night, no one is like any of us. The characters are on a descending flourish of monumental, disastrous dimension. The story baffles clarification. Do not fight this notion while watching this film. Few movies have required more patience; let it overtake you at its own pace, because the pace is the measure of the dramatic wallop.
The final shot is of Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards and Dean Stockwell sitting around a table, each lost in their own enslaving pipe dreams, a distant lighthouse sweeping its beam across the room periodically, the camera pulling back slowly, the walls steadily disappearing. The family sits in a black oblivion, getting smaller and smaller, and the smaller they get, the larger we realize their impact has been on us.
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