Ryan's Dotter

I am at the wind-battered shore of the Delaware Bay, getting wind-battered. Proof that I am not immune to the elements, however weather-proofed my soul. No, I was getting knocked around silly by the wind yesterday just like everybody else, its gusty insistence reminiscent of the build-up to the lashing gale in David Lean's Ryan's Daughter, only without that idiot opera chorus of Irish peasants pouring out of the side of the screen, as if the signal came to open the chute.

We watched Ryan's Daughter before we left, and though while not an unmitigated debacle for the record books (though the reviews were such a shower of spears that Lean retired from directing for a decade and a half before returning with A Passage to India, where apparently Judy Davis gave him a lot of lip), it is an oddly misconceived project in terms of scale, casting, and taste--a conte mounted as a Radio City Music Hall epic, complete with Overture, Intermission, and Entre'acte, which is all a bit much.

Sarah Miles is Rosy,* a Hardyesque heroine of innocence and yearning who marries a kind, gentle, older, sedate, gardening schoolteacher played by Robert Mitchum, cast so wildly against type that he seems wasted in a role that could have been played by a James Fox or the neutered beau Joanne Woodward rejects in The Long Hot Summer. (Now there's a movie.) It isn't that Mitchum is bad, it's that his calm underplaying amounts to woeful underutilization, not allowing for any of the shadings or undercurrents Mitchum would demonstrate in The Friends of Eddie Coyle before he went almost completely pouchy. The wedding night he and Rosy spend stacked on top of each other in the missionary position is such a perfunctory affair (with no follow-through, as if it were a ticket being punched) that it provoked Pauline Kael to ask Lean (as legend goes), "Are you saying Mitchum is a lousy lay?" Lousy or not, it does appear that Mitchum's character is a mild chap who would rather grade papers and trim flowers than fuck Sarah Miles' lovely, loving, unfulfilled Rosy, a major misplacement of priorities.

In looms a handsome, maimed, near-mute, decorated British officer just returned from the muddy, bloody fields of World War I, an almost mystic vision of a woman's romantic longings silhouetted against a phallic local landmark, in case we didn't get the Lawrencian message. And it's Lawrencian sex he bestows, in a woodsy paradise in which he and Rosy mate like nature's first lovers and her orgasm blooms her cheeks, making her name finally apt. In a risible bit of symbolic telegraphing, Lean has Rosy greeting her husband after her first adulterous assignation wearing a bright red blouse, as if shouting to the rooftops that she's now a Scarlet Woman, not that Mr. Chips notices, though he does pick up other clues pretty fast. Subtle this movie is not--early Lean was never this note-pounding.

So what's worthy about Ryan's Daughter? Set on the Irish coast, it looks gorgeous, and the cataclysmic storm sequence is justly famous, a heroic feat of filmmaking. Sarah Miles is true and affecting as the film's sacrificial lamb, punished for wanting more out of life than the tiny portion of passion and joy this fishing village allots, and Christopher Jones is an impressive sculptural creation as the war-haunted human effigy, all ramrod posture, cheekbones, and doll eyes, his military manner strict and decisive and terse, yet someone who is broken inside and fragile, and whose Romantic doom is signed in the beach sand by his Byronic limp. Jones's voice was dubbed by an English actor, his Method approach rankled Lean and neither was happy with the other, but his abstract minimalism is highly stylized physically--he would have fit right in in Reflections in a Golden Eye--he manages to be emotionally potent, an astringent antidote to all the raucous overacting around him once he leaves Sarah Miles' embrace.

There's also a beautifully visioned sequence in which Mitchum imagines his wife and her lover walking along the beach, she in a yellow dress, he in his tight uniform, as Mitchum, the imaginer, hides behind a rock shading a small pool--a rapt composition that is like something out of a dream ballet, a Tudoresque tableau. If only Lean could have kept the film in this trance state! But too much bother comes barging in.

The film's mortal sins are threefold:

1) The appalling sentimentality of John Mills' Michael, the mentally retarded cripple who serves as the movie's Shakespearean fool and sainted donkey, ridiculed and mistreated by the villagers and yet witness to everyone's secrets (at one point, a troll under the bridge, he snags a fish out of the water with his bare hands, anticipating Gollum), even if he's unable to articulate them. He turns up in scene after scene until you groan at the prospect of another spasm of his mugging and gesticulations and humiliation at the hands of others, and even when he's not instrumental to the action Lean insists on one crooked-mouth, incredulous reaction shot after another of Michael gawping and why most of these weren't left on the editing-room floor is inexplicable. It's such a gaudy bit of tortuous and torturous performance art and sincere, committed mugging that of course the otherwise suave John Mills won a supporting actor Oscar for this damned travesty.

And, at one point, to illustrate the deeper affinity between them, Lean films Michael and Christopher Jones' officer walking in tandem, their crippled legs dragging in sync, both of them in very different ways society's misfits.

2) The score by Maurice Jarre, which couldn't have gone more wrong. It's perhaps understandable that Lean wanted to avoid a musical score derived by traditional Irish folk music as being too obvious, but this score sounds like something Fellini-esque suitable for a calliope, an ironic commentary on the film that's so arch and winsome that its seems slightly deranged ladled over what's transpiring on screen. The movie needs something more brooding and mysterious, more Vaughn Williams, and instead we get this Gallic-Roman confection that fairly cries out for a Vittorio De Sica movie to adopt. Christ, is it annoying.

3) The use of the Irish townspeople, in which the entire village seems to be populated (with a few sweet exceptions) by village idiots. I can't remember which critic once said that although as a director of spectacle Richard Attenborough is often treated as an inferior version of David Lean, there was one area in which he was Lean's superior--in the handling of crowd scenes. (The crowd scenes in Gandhi being so much more convincing and dynamic than Lean's in Dr. Zhivago.) Here, the extras look and move like extras--en masse, as if they were all herded onto the set from their corral--and rush to and fro as if this were a Verdi opera, all of them showing up for very occasion like the townsfolk in Blazing Saddles, or the early formation of a Tea Party. When the afflicted Michael shows up with a lobster, they grab it from him and toss it around like a football as he fumbles and stumbles to get it back, they throw back their heads and laugh with a riotous abandon that looks like worst kind of bullshit peasant gusto handed down from bad Shakespeare productions. The old women are prudish harpies and the younger women are jealous vipers and the men of the village old and young are sunken-cheeked sots and they all throw back their heads and roar with hearty cruel laughter until it's a wonder some of them didn't swallow their dentures. And this, or a variation of it, happens again and again, the locals' raucous, pawing celebrating at the wedding reception turning into a bonehead bacchanal that makes Sam Peckinpah's staging of the wedding in Ride the High Country look like Racine.

The way the townspeople turn on Rosy at the end, meting out a ritual shaming akin to that suffered by French women accused of fraternizing with the Nazis, is horrible to watch but doesn't carry the dramatic, revelatory impact it should because they've been behaving stupidly and callously all along, a single-minded, simple-minded mob. (The true horror would have been witnessing normally bland, agreeable everyday people turn into vengeful, righteous wolves once they have a weak victim at their mercy.) If it weren't for Trevor Howard's priest showing up at opportune moments to break things up, they'd be doling out mob violence every afternoon just to keep their stone-throwing arms limber.

Fortunately, the winds have died down here and there are no rumors of Irish rebels retrieving arms caches from the wave-pounding shore of the Delaware Bay. Lots of mockingbirds around though.

I like mockingbirds. They seem to have the proper perspective on things.

*Her father, the Ryan of Ryan's Daughter, is played by Leo McKern, so identified with Rumpole of the Bailey that his earlier roles seem like rehearsals.