This is a horror movie.
Long Day’s Journey Into Night is based on the Eugene O’Neill play, and it very much feels like a filmed play, with everything taking place in one location, the family home, over the course of a day.
The film begins cheerily enough, with a mother, father and their two sons gathered around the table for breakfast. A well-to-do middle class family in a fine house with servants and a beautiful sea view high on a hill. But the undercurrent of tension, recrimination, and fear isn’t long in making itself felt.
Jessica Lange is stunning and heart-breaking as Mary, the matriarch, a woman who has been destroyed by morphine, loneliness, and the steady accumulation of woes that comes with living long enough. It’s not an easy role, Mary is not a sighing, helpless victim, the writing doesn’t cheat at making her likeable by making her an object of pity. Mary is ugly, mean-spirited, her whole character swallowed by the morphine, sporting the profound selfishness of the addict. She meditates on her wrongs and resentments while high, growing so full of poison, she bursts, filling her family’s life with constant tirades about how they have ruined her happiness, how they have failed her, how blighted she is by them.
And it’s despite this, you still come to break your heart for her. Beautiful writing and an excruciatingly sensitive performance by Jessica show Mary hopelessly lost and desperately trying to hold onto her sense of self. A frantic scratching and scraping through her memories to recover how she came to be this way, when it all went wrong, and who is to blame. And with each horrific stinging spiteful thing she barks at those around her is a splinter of love she went looking for in her ruins.
And that is what makes the hurt all the sharper. Because they do love each other, all. The sons support and care for one another as they both endure their home-life. The father James (played by Ed Harris giving arguably the performance of his career) loves his wife, and desperately wishes he could save her from this sickness, living with the aching loss of her while she is still in front of him, touching her and being unable to reach her. And all have this shared sense of camaraderie, all isolated in this house on the hill, their shame known only to each other, all drowning together. Even Mary, at times will awake to see the man she fell in love with, the children she cradled with tenderness, and then the moment will pass, like the clouds over the sun, and she will once again be fighting the battles of the past, all gone now and beyond remedy.
Mary is haunted, by loneliness, by loss, by mortality and the spectre of death. Her helplessness in the face of her addiction, her spiralling tirades back and back and back again to the old resentments, the behaviour she swears off then repeats, she is a woman trapped by her past, doomed to constantly relive it, to the destruction of the present. But, as she says, “The past is the present, isn’t it? And the future too”.
And that’s what makes this a horror movie. An exquisitely written family drama, but a horror story none the less. This is a haunted house, filled with ghosts, and they are all the breathing people who live there. What is Mary’s existence but a living nightmare? What is that of the others, driven to drink to stay sane in the face of her madness? Each of them assigned their roles long, long ago, from birth even, and never allowed to move on from their assigned parts. Never permitted to have any other character than what everyone has decided for them, never know themself in any other way than through the fractured lens of a fractured woman.
The fact this gruelling autopsy of a family is but a day’s work in the long line of days stretching out before them, it’s enough to instill a terror of life as strong as that of death. Excellent film.