Long Day's Journey Into Night

"Obsession is nothing more than a trick of the mind, an attempt to reattain something that may never have existed in the first place."

A couple weeks ago I watched an unusual film titled Long Day's Journey Into Night. When I took it out from the library I expected it to be a film based on Eugene O'Neill's Pulitzer Prize-winning play by the same name. The only thing the film and the play have in common is that each has an unusual story around it.

The story behind O'Neill's play is that he wrote it in 1941, but locked it in a vault to be read (and performed) posthumously. O'Neill died in 1953, and the play was performed in 1956. Very personal and autobiographical, the story takes place in one single day from 1912.

The film by the same name opened in theaters on December 3, 2018. Somehow the public got the wrong idea about this film. This is not a typical movie. Rather, it is an "art house" film. On its first day it generated 38 million dollars in revenue. Because it's the internet era, the online backlash against the film was so great that it had almost no sales after the opening weekend. That is, post opening weekend it earned 3 only million dollars more.

Frankly, there is much to like about this movie. The director has taken a keen interest in surfaces and textures. The settings are lush, not like polished silver, but more like deteriorating walls, peeling paint in the shadowlands, the kinds of surfaces I used to enjoy taking photos of. 

The story takes place in China, the main character seeming to be on a quest to find a lost love. It's an altogether different storyline from the Bill Murray film Broken Flowers. Perhaps it's a little surreal for some but many reviewers at imdb.com absolutely loved it. The pace is slow, but the unpredictable nature of the story is satisfying for those who are willing to just go with the flow. 

The theme revolves around memories, real and imagined. It's territory many of us have trod as we got older.

The only thing I really didn't like is that the central character had a pistol which he brandished at times. I thought of Chekhov's dictum that “If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there.”

If you happen upon it and want to try something different, have at it. I enjoyed it enough to consider watching it again, even if it is not a perfect film to some extent. 

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8185182/