Lungo viaggio verso la notte

Outstanding performances highlight this televised version of the 1986 stage triumph of Eugene O'Neill's electrifying play about a family whose lives continuously crumble with each hour in one day. Lemmon is brilliant as the patriarch, a faded matinee idol; Leslie, as a dope addict; Spacey, exceptional as a drunken loafer and Gallagher as the youngest son, stricken with consumption. Passionate acting, superb pacing and top notch direction make this extraordinary production worth the watch.

This production is worth viewing for Bethel Leslie. I really dislike director Jonathan Miller's domestication of the Tyrones. I understand what he was after... and he did succeed; but for me this play shouldn't be brought down to earth. It's not a television "dramedy." When I saw this production live, I overheard one audience member at intermission jocularly tell her companion, "They're just like my family!" And at the play's climax (Mary Tyrone's descent down the staircase) when Jamie (Kevin Spacey) uttered his line, "The mad scene: enter Ophelia" the audience roared with laughter. To me, that's a little like urging an audience to laugh when Lear brings in the lifeless body of his youngest daughter Cordelia.

Jack Lemmon was a fine actor, but he always brought himself to the roles he played and in this case it was hard for me to forget that he was not Ens. Pulver, C.C. Baxter or Felix Unger. I did like Peter Gallagher as Edmund, but not Kevin Spacey's take on Jamie (oddly after being unimpressed with Spacey in this and THE ICEMAN COMETH, I *loved* his interpretation of Jim Tyrone in his revival of A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN... essentially an older version of the same role he plays here).

But then there's Bethel Leslie who makes this whole production worthwhile. I won't say she's the best Mary Tyrone I've ever seen, but only because saying so really makes no sense since many great actresses have played this role in many different ways. She is a less sympathetic Mary than usual -- that the character is an emotional vampire has never been more evident -- but it's a valid interpretation and a very disturbing one.

I know some fans of the play love this production, so I actually urge people to see it and decide for themselves. I think this is a well executed production of a flawed interpretation of the play.

This is a film of the 1986 Broadway production of the play. The unusual thing about this production is the use of overlapping dialog -- the actors intentionally step on each other's lines. This gives the effect that none of the characters is listening to any of the other characters. It is disorienting, but it is also true to life. Humans rarely communicate. They just talk at each other, not with each other. The results are the tragedy that we see in the play -- people reduced to ghosts lost in the fog and in the night.

Where were the Emmys? Out to lunch? Obviously, for their shameful, almost criminal lack of nominations for three of these actors.

Gallagher and Spacey are beyond brilliant- young, vital, totally in character, superb is a word that is not good enough.

Leslie is visually a combo of Judi Dench (God, wouldn't one die for a Mary Tyrone from her!) and Hepburn, but she makes the part her own. Another brilliant performance.

The only fly in the ointment is Lemmon - his performance is full of Lemmon-ses! Stock vocal and physical posturing that has become his trademark acting ability. He is abominably bad. Unlike the others, he doesn't even try to become Tyrone, he just filters the character through his stock mannerisms. Shame on him.

Still, you must see this for the brilliance of the other three actors.

The difference between this production of Long Day's Journey Into Night and the 1962 version is the difference between a filmed stage play and a movie. The 1962 film was an incredible work, one of the best adapted stage plays to film ever.

One big part of the play is the obsession of James Tyrone into making a grand estate as would befit a celebrated matinée idol of the stage. With the action taking place in the Tyrone living room in the play you have to depend on the players to envision this edifice that Tyrone is trying to create. In the 1962 film the dialog moves in and out and around the grounds of the estate and the film was shot in a mansion that still stands on the Connecticut ocean shore and is an attraction today. The house becomes a character unto itself and therefore the 1962 film has dimensions that cannot be realized here.

Playing the wildly dysfunctional Tyrone family is Jack Lemmon and Bethel Leslie and their sons, Kevin Spacey and Peter Gallagher. O'Neill takes us back to a moment in time in 1912 as his alter ego Peter Gallagher is sick with tuberculosis, but knowing he has a gift to give the world and worrying whether he will live long enough to give it. It's through his eyes we see the events unfold.

O'Neill plays are long and deep on characterization if short on action. But the characters linger with you forever. Jack Lemmon is the patriarch, a former matinée idol as O'Neill's father was, grown famous for playing a pulp version of The Count Of Monte Cristo a gazillion times. Like someone in a long running television series, he became a victim of typecasting and the public wouldn't see him in anything else. But the role made him prosperous, but intellectually stifled.

Watching Lemmon he must have studied Ralph Richardson's 1962 performance so much that pieces of Richardson kept creeping into his mouth. At times he was almost imitating him. Still Jack Lemmon is a good enough actor to create his own Tyrone.

That will not be said about Bethel Leslie whose health is everyone's concern and what the family revolves around. She doesn't sound the least like Katharine Hepburn. During the difficult birth of her second son who grew up to be Peter Gallagher, she was prescribed narcotics for the pain and grew to like it too much. As she married well, her addiction kept her from being a police problem or a dreg on whatever meager social services existed in 1912. It's not clear what started her on this, but my guess would be laudanum, an opium derivative and prescribed by a lot of quack doctors and even some good ones who didn't know at the time what the long term effects were. Leslie is as riveting as Katharine Hepburn was.

Ditto for Kevin Spacey who stepped into the giant shoes of Jason Robards who was considered to be the premier interpreter of the works of Eugene O'Neill in his time. The older son carried the father's hopes and dreams of succeeding him as a stage actor of renown, but his love of the nightlife of Broadway overtook him. That final drunken scene with his father and brother where he just totally loses it is Spacey reaching incredible dimensions.

Gallagher takes it all in and he will survive despite a father who won't send him to a proper sanitarium for a cure because he's cheap, despite a mother who clings to him, despite a brother who can't reconcile love, hate, and jealousy that he has all at the same time. He did survive and gave us some of the best work in American literature.

And this is a fine production of one of the best works of American literature.