John and Matthew are watching every single live-action film starring Meryl Streep.
#25 — Kate Mundy, the elder head of a matriarchal clan in Ireland’s County Donegal circa 1936.
MATTHEW: Dancing at Lughnasa continues the sporadic but prestigious practice, begun by Plenty and leading up to August: Osage County, of Meryl Streep headlining big-ticket Broadway plays in screen adaptations that tend to do a disservice to the often truncated works whose very suitability for such stage-to-cineplex transfers feels rather strained. (Angels in America, made for HBO, is obviously a highly distinguished exception.) These films are greenlit as glorified acting showcases in the hopes of magnetizing a similar haul of trophies as their acclaimed theatrical predecessors. They may feature some fine, forceful performances (from Streep and several others), but their claims as cinema remain dubious at best.
I’m always curious about why Streep seldom returns to her first love, the stage, especially when one considers that the actress’ greatest role in the last decade was not Susan Orlean, Clarissa Vaughan, or Miranda Priestley, but Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, whose wagon of wares Streep took up for a 2006 Shakespeare in the Park production, four years after playing Irina in The Seagull for the same summer series...
Chalk this absence up to personal conflicts or a predilection for the relative flexibility of moviemaking, but these alternative “filmed plays” are hardly the most advantageous application of Streep’s singular artistry. Pat O’Connor’s pedestrian screen translation of Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, which was the Tony-winning toast of the 1991-1992 Broadway season, makes this uncomfortably clear.
Set in Ireland’s County Donegal during the summer of 1936, Friel’s play chronicles the trials of the five tightly-knit, cash-strapped Mundy sisters: Kate (Streep), the eldest, a hidebound and remonstrative school teacher; Maggie (Kathy Burke), the wisecracking, peacekeeping primary homemaker; Agnes (Brid Brennan, best in show and reprising her Tony-earning role), the withdrawn and quietly exasperated helpmate to Maggie; Rose (Sophie Thompson), a mentally-impaired misfit being courted by a feckless divorcee; and the youngest, Christina (Catherine McCormack), mother of Michael, a young boy conceived with a rakish, wandering free spirit (Rhys Ifans), who comes to call whenever he can remember. Dancing at Lughnasa, whose events are framed as the remembrances of an adult Michael (Gerard McSorley, narrating from the present), is ostensibly about the collapsing of a way of life and the demise of a home that can never be returned to. But its manifold conflicts are as fleeting as a kite slipping through a child’s hand — which, yes, is the visual metaphor that bookends the film — and its overriding thesis on the personal destruction waged by modernization remains far too flimsy to take very seriously, leaving us with a memory play that has only its memories, hazy and incomplete.
Streep, for her part, gives a present and professional performance but it's far too inclined towards surface-dwelling matronly affectations, all rimroad postures, restively outraged glances, and strident tongue-lashings with little differentiation. She personifies domestic authoritarianism with a certain pinched quality, defined by dark, stern eyes and a mouth kept folded when it isn’t letting loose with back-straightening reprimands in the face of her sisters’ reckless misbehavior. Part of the problem is that the best Streep performances always keep us guessing about the inner workings of a character’s complex mindset or inscrutable heart. But aside from a crush on a local apothecary clerk, revealed with blushes and giggles but then swiftly forgotten, Kate remains a woefully unsecretive creation; there is no private life for Streep to turn inside-out. Her sisters may be prone to dubious decisions and outward displays of emotional vulnerability, but Kate remains a pillar of both moral righteousness and self-reliant strength.
What do you make of this rarely-discussed Streep vehicle?
JOHN: I’m almost certain that Streep would cringe at our calling Dancing at Lughnasa a “Streep vehicle,” it being a fairly balanced ensemble piece that caught her eye for this very reason. In a 1999 interview, Streep confessed that she had in fact missed the stage, and she began, “circling the theater, to see if I could fit my large, overly important self into an ensemble again in the way that everybody does seamlessly in the theater. And they were amazing to me, forgiving and welcoming.” Kudos to Streep’s egalitarian inclination (the film would have never been financed without her), but it’s impossible to escape the fact of Streep’s celebrity among an ensemble of lesser-known actors all speaking in genuine Irish brogues. Her accent is not bad per se, but becomes noticeably put-on when contrasted with her castmates, and there are certain high-pitched moments where the accent slips to reveal the Jersey Girl pulling the strings underneath.
But let’s not be too hard on Streep, whose fine effort to “fit herself” into this ensemble enables brief yet sharp exchanges between Kate and her sisters, as when Agnes rightfully calls her a “damned righteous bitch,” or when, sitting around the kitchen table, they all begin singing a hymn together. Streep nails the scene where Kate defends her brother (Michael Gambon), an unhinged missionary newly returned from Africa, against the local church’s pastor, who refuses to let him say mass. Here, Streep channels her otherwise spurious sense of rage toward more warranted directions and, conversely, her giving little Darrell Johnston (as young Michael) an early birthday present allows for a small dose of Streep’s singular warmth.
In perhaps her best scene, Streep watches her sister Christina dally outside after reuniting with her sweetheart, remarking how “her whole face alters when she’s happy,” as Kate remains hopelessly cantankerous and alone, trapped behind the window.
As much as the cast tries, Dancing at Lughnasa remains a stultifying endeavor, an assortment of scattered plotlines, truncated emotional arcs, and imprecise characters unhelped by O’Connor’s dull direction. It’s as though Frank McGuinness, who adapted Friel’s play, wanted to script a chamber drama without any actual drama, instead making dubious connections between Ugandan tribalism, Catholic asceticism, and mental illness while both celebrating and criticizing the Ireland of his memories. 1930s Ireland may have been stubbornly resistant toward modernity, afflicted with penury and sorrow, and beset by small-town moralizing gossip, but the film never confronts these realities directly. Instead, Dancing at Lughnasa vacillates between flutes, fiddles, and family camaraderie amid picturesque rural landscapes and the private, unexamined loneliness of the Mundy clan, with all its individual sadnesses and unrequited desires. Streep’s performance is never allowed the dimensionality that could have illuminated the bruised soul underneath her strenuously virtuous exterior. There is no directorial hand to subdue her theatrical mannerisms, and the performance, for all its well-intentioned effort and flashes of grace, never goes anywhere. But if Dancing at Lughnasa teaches us anything it is perhaps far better to just dance our frustrations out than to think too deeply about the past.
