‘Long Day’s Journey into Night’ – Back in Time Recommendation
To sit almost three hours through the ordeal of harsh confrontations and merciless blamings within a wounded family is a tour-de-force. Eugene O’Neill’s play and Sidney Lumet’s filmatization of the play Long Day’s Journey into Night offers you that opportunity. But why would we want to do that? Because it may help us to ask the right questions about choices in life and family history, and above all about our own spirit and what it is that may prevent us from gliding into the swamps of self-pity and destructive relationships.
A famous Eugene O’Neill quote says: ”We need above all to learn again to believe in the possibility of nobility of spirit in ourselves.” If we can’t learn to have mercy on ourselves and on others and if we can’t believe in the nobility of the human spirit, we are in real danger of harming ourselves and those we are close to.
Sidney Lumet’s film from 1962 closely follows the play text of Eugene O’Neill. The play was written in 1940 and first published after the playwright’s death in February 1956, and is considered as one of the all-time great classics of the 20th century. Eugene O’Neill transformed American play writing from entertainment into a vehicle for confronting human trauma and basic human concerns. He wrote more than 20 plays and was awarded with the Nobel Prize for literature in 1936.
The ‘night’ of the play’s title is the darkness of tragedy and disillusionment. The whole film plays inside the summer house of retired actor James Tyrone and his wife Mary. They are joined by their two grown-up sons Jamie and Edmund. The only outside noise we hear is the sound of a foghorn serving as a metaphor for the state of the family: everything and everyone is in a fog, and the fog is getting thicker all through the long day.
For me the most remarkable words Mary Tyrone speaks in the play are:
“None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it, and once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.”
The incident she refers to is when she left her new-born son Eugene behind and joined her husband on a theatre trip. While she was gone, the then seven year old Jamie caught the measles, tripped into Eugene’s room and infected him. The baby died, leading her into a crisis and into the life-long misery of guilt and blame. She blames her husband who “made her go with him on all his tours” while “never feeling at home in the theater”. She blames her oldest son for having infected the baby. She blames her younger son for having caused her health problems, when pain problems after his birth led to her morphine addiction. Each one in the family have their own reasons to blame the others.
So, we are left to struggle with the question of what the dawn is after the journey into night. What have we done with the things life has done to us? How do you find meaning and renewed joy when frustration, disappointment and suffering have hit you? Hope and meaning cannot be built on the expectation that things go well for us. Then Long Day’s Journey Into Night confronts us with the harsh realities of life and points at the need for seeking transcendence.
Rinus, Oct 2021
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Thank you for this Rinus. Thank you for giving 3+ hours of your life to this film to be able to bring us a thought provoking synopsis.
We can’t choose what we receive in life, but we can choose walk deeper into the swamp and lose ourselves or to believe that there is some solid footing, some meaning somewhere under the muck and that it is worth the struggle to find it.
Mary Tyrone’s line: “until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be” makes me wonder if there isn’t a step missing. If we don’t come to accept who we are, who we have come to be, we can’t begin to make a move towards who we want to be…then we really will remain stuck in the mire.
Thanks for the reminder of a great play, a personal history and a film to watch. During my only acting class at university, my performances were normally reviewed as mediocre except when I played Edmund in a scene from the A Long Day’s Journey into night. After all these years, I still remember the beautiful experience of acting when at the end of the scene there was dead silence in the class followed by great applause. O’Neill’s words, my friend’s directing, and our interaction created a good moment for all present. I look forward to the insights the film brings to this classic work.