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Long Day's Journey Into Night (1996)

Director: David Wellington

Writer: Eugene O'Neill

Cast: William Hutt, Martha Henry, Peter Donaldson, Martha Burns

Character: Edmund Tyrone

Billing: 3rd

Plot: A day in the life of the troubled Irish-American Tyrone family, from the play by Eugene O'Neill.

Review: This is a very hard film to review. In most cases, I would begin with something like "Tom McCamus blew everyone else out of the water, words fail me, this guy is a great actor". Which would be fine, because he gives a stupendous performance in this movie, except that so does everyone else. Before watching this, I hadn't read the O'Neill play, but I did read A Moon For The Misbegotten a while back, which impressed me, but didn't prepare me for this. I suppose the fact that I'm an English student means that I'll like this film a lot more than most people, but the first time I watched it I was whacked out on some virus or other, hadn't eaten for three days, and felt about an inch detached from my own body. Maybe I was sympathising with Edmund, but I was still enthralled. You will be hard pressed to find either individual or ensemble acting like this in any film or theatre production, and even forgetting O'Neill's great writing, that makes it one to get hold of by any means necessary. The only thing, and this is more of a warning than a complaint, is that it is three hours long, takes place all in one room, has five characters, and the nearest you get to an action sequence is Tom walking into a hatstand. If you can get past that, go watch the movie.

Trivia: Based on Diana LeBlanc's production at Stratford, which Tom and the other cast members had been doing for a couple of years. Directed by David Wellington, of I Love A Man In Uniform, who apparently just phoned up Tom one day to find out what he was doing and ended up directing a movie. Set based on O'Neill's actual house.