Dancing at Lughnasa Review
by James Sanford (jamessanford AT earthlink DOT net)February 23rd, 1999
Just after the climactic moment in "Dancing At Lughnasa," the five Mundy sisters stand facing one another, breathless and yet strangely invigorated. They look at each other in silence, perhaps sensing for the first time how much they need each other. Or maybe on a subconscious level they each know it's only a matter of time before their way of life comes to an end.
"Lughnasa," adapted from Brian Friel's acclaimed play, so beautifully captures the details of its time and place and its characters' lives that it's difficult to resist being drawn in. Director Pat O'Connor did a similarly fine job evoking 1950s Irish life in the lovely sleeper "Circle of Friends," and here he recreates 1936 Ireland, specifically rural Donegal, where the Mundys live quietly on a tiny farm that has probably seen better days.
The same can be said for most of the women. Self-righteous schoolteacher Kate (Meryl Streep) rules the roost, ordering her siblings around like servants. Her sole delight seems to come from seeing others take a fall: "Her dancing days will be over," she smirks, when a snooty former student is forced into marriage. Clownish Maggie (Kathy Burke) does what she can to inject a little levity into the house. Quiet Agnes (Brid Brennan) looks after the mentally challenged Rose (Sophie Thompson); the youngest sister Christina (Catherine McCormack) looks after her eight-year-old son Michael (Darrell Johnston), the result of her affair with a devil-may-care Welshman named Gerry (Rhys Ifans), who drops by every 18 months or so.
None of the sisters have had much luck with love or money; their only luxuries are a bicycle and a wireless set that occasionally picks up a bit of music. When brother Jack (Michael Gambon) returns to Donegal after doing missionary work in Uganda and announces he thinks he's come home to die, Maggie gasps, "Jesus, don't! We can't afford to bury you." Jack's reappearance is just the first harbinger of changes for the Mundys. He went to Africa as a Catholic priest but has since become obsessed with the rituals and practices of the natives, much to the dismay of Kate. Instead of saying Mass at the local church, Jack would rather investigate the celebrations of the pagan Feast of Lughnasa, in which drunken participants leap over bonfires and dance.
Dancing becomes a recurring motif in the film as the only way the women can escape the drudgery of their day-to-day routines. Small wonder Kate and Agnes look on with just a touch of jealousy as Gerry waltzes with Christina; the only thing better than dancing is dancing with someone else.
With very little in the way of plot, "Lughnasa" must rely on character development for its drama. In lesser hands, Kate might have come off as a stern, humorless old maid, but instead we can see how much she really cares about keeping her family together and holding on to their home. As expected, Streep's accent is flawless but what's even more impressive is how she brings out Kate's hidden colors, which this woman has cloaked in multiple layers of acid and ice.
Burke's buoyant Maggie, McCormack's tolerant Christina and Brennan's timid Agnes also reveal unexpected personality traits as "Lughnasa" progresses. The screenplay falters only in a slightly melodramatic episode involving Rose's infatuation with an unsuitable man; that O'Connor intercuts scenes of a fox raiding a henhouse into this sequence doesn't help matters.
"Lughnasa" is much more effective at showing how the Mundys manage to survive their many disputes and differences and find some peaceful common ground. Like most families, they're often so busy worrying about the future that they don't realize how happy they should be. They may not be wealthy or blessed with much in the way of material possessions, but the women of "Lughnasa" prove that sisterhood can truly be powerful.
James Sanford
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