With the newest film adaptation of Long Day’s Journey Into Night you don’t even need to have seen Jessica Lange as Mary Tyrone on Broadway to understand how she won a Tony for this performance. Though the Tony was for her second portrayal of Mary, she first came to this role back in 2000 for the West End production in London. 25 years later, Lange is back as the morphine-addicted mother and wife. This renewed adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s classic autobiographical play not only has Lange reprising her role, Jonathan Kent changes from directing this stage play into film form for his feature debut. Long Day’s Journey Into Night is about a family suffering through addictions and hostilities, creating tensions for the audience to experience.
Over the span of a single day, married couple Mary (Lange) and James Tyrone (Harris), along with their two sons, Jamie (Ben Foster) and Edmund (Colin Morgan) unravel in this major confrontation. Grappling with Mary’s morphine addiction, the boys confront each other over the past, while dealing with their own alcoholism and illnesses.
What is interesting about the Tyrone family is though the boys are all concerned about Mary’s addiction to morphine, they don’t confront her directly about it. They spend most of the film indirectly telling her they know she started using again, all the while spiraling out of control themselves. By the end of the film, the audience learns that each member of the family was dealing with their own problems, and none of them knew how to properly handle it.
As time elapses during the Tyrone’s long day, audiences are rarely brought away from their house – apart from a few scenes along the beach. Rarely can one setting itself keep the viewer’s interest peaked, and that is when it comes down to the actors’ performances. While Harris, Foster and Morgan all excel in creating an environment filled with whisky, Lange steals the show – bringing her Tony winning performance to film. Mary’s character is a worrying mother, who became sick and was given morphine to deal with the pain. As Lange performs, she conveys such pain and loneliness through the screen. Mary becomes less and less stable, Lange’s vocal range changes and her facial emotions bring out the immense fragility of her character. It is a film, a story, where the emphasis on foregrounding the performances is the most important, and where it excelled.
Audiences follow one day with the Tyrone family, four tragic figures, as they each try to figure out their own way through. Jessica Lange and Ed Harris reunite after 40 years and they emerge with stellar performances, the highlight of Long Day’s Journey Into Night.
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