movie review long day's journey into night

Review: Bi Gan’s time-bending noir ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ is a magical piece of filmmaking

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Good new movies, regardless of what others may tell you, are never in short supply. Enter any theater in Los Angeles and you are more than likely to find one worth your time. What you are less apt to find is enchantment: a picture that succeeds, through some alchemy of dazzling trickery and genuine feeling, in recapturing the pleasures of what was once commonly known as “movie magic.”

But lo and behold, an honest-to-God, how’d-they-do-that enchantment has slipped into theaters this week, and as is fitting for a work of such transparently pure cinema, words seem even less adequate than usual to the task of describing it.

The glory of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” a full-body swoon of a movie from the 28-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan, is an ingenious, nearly hour-long sequence that was shot in an unbroken take and then converted to 3-D in post-production. It constitutes the second act and the emotional centerpiece of this moody, mind-bending romantic noir, and it ranks among the great poetic and technical achievements in recent cinema. (While the movie can be seen in standard two-D, the three-D version begins screening this week only at the Landmark, and is strongly recommended in that format.)

But I am getting ahead of myself, which may be fitting for a movie so unbound by temporal constraints. The first half of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” consists of shorter individual shots and sequences, but its progression is still dizzying, slipping freely and without warning among flashbacks, reveries and present-tense reality. Like an upstart Alain Resnais, Bi treats cinematic time as a toy to be played with, and he has little interest in explaining the rules of his particular game.

At the beginning, whatever that means, an ex-casino manager named Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue) has returned home after his father’s death to Kaili City, in China’s subtropical Guizhou province. (The city also provided the setting of Bi’s beguiling 2015 debut feature, “Kaili Blues,” which anticipates this movie in its fragmentary storytelling and jaw-dropping command of the camera.) As Luo returns to his old stomping grounds — a restaurant run by his stepmother, a tunnel glimpsed through a melancholy sheet of rain, a flooded old building with gorgeous undulating light patterns on the walls — his every forward step draws him backward, inexorably, into the past.

As you have probably guessed, this “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” has little to do with Eugene O’Neill. A more literal translation of the Chinese title would be “Last Evenings on Earth,” which also happens to be the title of a collection of short stories by the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño — most of them, like this movie, about lonely wanderers on the margins of society. At once a cultural magpie and an unabashed show-off, Bi has structured his movie as a labyrinth of allusions, drawing on such classics of head-trip cinema as David Lynch’s “Mulholland Dr.,” Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s “Tropical Malady” and Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Stalker.”

He owes perhaps his greatest stylistic debt to Wong Kar-wai, the Hong Kong auteur best known for his magnificent art-house romance “In the Mood for Love.” Wong’s influence here is like a pulse, beating steadily beneath those gorgeous surfaces: It’s there in the voiceover that wraps every image in a veil of melancholy; the seductive, near-fetishistic attention to detail; and the undeniable resemblance between Luo and Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Wong’s most famous leading man.

Most of all, it’s there in the directors’ shared obsession with themes of lost time and remembrance. Memories of Luo’s past acquaintances keep resurfacing, including a childhood friend, nicknamed Wildcat, who died years ago at the hands of a local gangster (Chen Yongzhong), and a beautiful former lover, Wan Qiwen (Tang Wei, “Lust, Caution”), who has long since disappeared. It is Wan whom Luo cannot let go of, and you soon realize that whenever she appears, always wearing a green dress, we are lost in the mists of memory.

A sense of disorientation is a wholly appropriate response to a movie in which the past is both irretrievable and unshakable. But even at its most openly baffling, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” never loses its seductive pull. You learn to follow not the flow of exposition but rather the flow of images, as Bi invests crucial motifs — a broken clock, a pomelo fruit, a book containing a magic spell — with a piercing, almost totemic significance. The flow is sometimes quite literal: From the floods to the rain, there is water, water everywhere, until the production design itself seems to be swimming in tears of regret.

And then, just when it seems to have reached its formal limits, the picture triumphantly slips its own representational bonds. About halfway through, Luo enters a movie theater and dons a pair of three-D glasses, which is your cue to do the same. Immediately you are transported alongside him into a gorgeous nocturnal landscape, gently borne aloft by the steady, graceful movement of the camera. (Yao Hung-i, Dong Jingsong and David Chizallet are credited as directors of photography.) Without blinking or looking away, that camera floats after Luo as he emerges from a dark cavern, rides a motorbike along a road and then ziplines down into a mountain village with a billiard parlor, where still more beguiling encounters await.

“Once you know you’re dreaming, it’s an out-of-body experience,” Lu says at one point, putting words to the act of lucid dreaming. And you have rarely encountered a more lucid dream than this. In contrast with, say, “Gravity” or “Birdman,” which achieved their long traveling shots largely through digital editing and visual effects, this sequence was choreographed and executed, with no small difficulty, in real time. (Comparisons can be drawn to other analog one-take wonders such as Alexander Sokurov’s “Russian Ark” and Sebastian Schipper’s “Victoria.”)

The effect is one of sustained tension and wonderment, a state that compels both heightened attention and woozy surrender. For close to an hour, you watch as this metaphysical Rube Goldberg device plays out, as a succession of formal delights and narrative surprises are harmonized into a single, flowing movement that feels both utterly convincing and thrillingly irrational.

The film theorist André Bazin wrote that a long take, with its depth of focus, could bring “the spectator into a relation with the image closer to that which he enjoys with reality.” That’s true enough of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” except that it occupies a space where reality and dream have inextricably merged. Details from the first half turn up mysteriously in the second. A game of table tennis or billiards creates an agonizing logistical and philosophical suspense. Luo meets a woman, Kaizhen, who’s a doppelganger for Qiwen (and also played by Tang), in one of the movie’s more obvious quotations from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo.”

Are we being told the same story twice, in two equally hypnotic registers of dream logic? Is the second half, a dreamlike emanation from the first, or vice versa? “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” doesn’t just refuse to answer those questions definitively; it asserts that multiple answers — multiple realities — can coexist. In one sublime feat of cinematic prestidigitation, Bi forges new possibilities by which movies can defy the constraints of logic and represent the unrepresentable. When he refuses to cut away, he isn’t just performing a stunt; he’s giving voice to an obsession. He wants the movie to go on forever. He isn’t alone.

------------

‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’

Mandarin with English subtitles

Running time: 2 hours, 18 minutes

Playing: The Landmark, West Los Angeles, and Laemmle’s Playhouse 7, Pasadena

[email protected] | Twitter: @JustinCChang

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Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

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Long Day's Journey Into Night Reviews

In a way, the premise is just the antechamber that one has to see before entering the main room.

Full Review | Dec 14, 2023

Episode 44: Ash Is Purest White / Long Day's Journey into Night / An Elephant Sitting Still

Full Review | Original Score: 50/100 | Oct 4, 2021

Long Day's journey into Night is Tarkovski's The Mirror with a noir twist: the resolution of the crime is focused in the interior of a detective that goes on unlocking and illuminating corners of his own psychical interiority [Full review in spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7.5/10 | Aug 19, 2020

...an atmospheric, tropical film noir...

Full Review | Aug 14, 2020

It's a sensory, atmospheric, almost subjective experience of dreams, love and the most intrinsic fears. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jul 29, 2020

The darkness in Long Day's Journey into Night is comforting, seductive and beautiful, never ominous or threatening.

Full Review | Jul 17, 2020

Savor it. Dive into its wrinkles and swim in its sulci. Aside from some pacing issues, it's a half-remembered dream to behold.

Full Review | Jan 17, 2020

Long Day's Journey into Night is a risky film to launch anywhere, being slow in its exposition and resistant to easy interpretation. Approach with caution but, if in doubt, approach it anyway.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Dec 31, 2019

Bi [Gan] creates a sense of atmosphere that's superbly engulfing, filling scenes with subtle touches that add intrigue to a narrative that has very little pace.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Dec 30, 2019

[F]ans of directors Alain Resnais, David Lynch, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Nicolas Roeg, and Wong Kar-wai will likely find this art-house stunner an enrapturing experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 30, 2019

A wonderfully eerie watch.

Full Review | Original Score: B+ | Dec 29, 2019

It's a vanishingly rare occurrence to see something on screen and be unable to wrap your head around how it was achieved. But in Long Day's Journey Into Night... some kind of sorcery is at work.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 28, 2019

A slow, beautifully shot, film noir mystery, Long Day's Journey into Night propels us into a transcendental state, where we don't really know what's real and what's imagination.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Dec 27, 2019

Its final, hour-long single take tracking shot is not only a marvel of technical ingenuity, it's like an out-of-body experience that shatters the boundaries of what cinema can do.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 27, 2019

...this is a beautiful, delicate affair, where the transitory and the eternal meet in a kiss. As an exploration of yearning, Bi's romantic mystery, calmly and quietly, delivers fireworks.

Full Review | Dec 27, 2019

There are touches of Kafka, also of Tarkovsky, to this dream-like and beguilingly non-literal film that concludes with an audacious 3D sequence that explains everything, and nothing.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 26, 2019

This is immersive cinema, designed to be experienced rather than just watched.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 23, 2019

There is such artistry and audacity in this new film from 30-year-old Chinese director Bi Gan.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | Dec 20, 2019

Little of this adds up, unless you like films in which two plus two equals nine.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Dec 18, 2019

If one could go past the lack of coherence in the narrative and instead focus on its aesthetics, however, he would definitely enjoy a truly artful movie.

Full Review | Dec 2, 2019

• Kino Lorber

Summary Bi Gan follows up his knockout debut, Kaili Blues, with this noir-tinged stunner about a lost soul (Jue Huang) on a quest to find a missing woman from his past (Wei Tang). Following leads across Guizhou province, he crosses paths with a series of colorful characters, among them a prickly hairdresser played by Taiwanese superstar Sylvia C ... Read More

Directed By : Bi Gan

Written By : Bi Gan

Long Day's Journey Into Night

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Wan Qiwen, Kaizhen

Sylvia Chang

Wildcat's mom, red-hair woman, hong-chi lee, yongzhong chen, zuo hongyuan, feiyang luo, wildcat (childhood), chloe maayan, chun-hao tuan, ex-husband of wan qiwen, woman prisoner, lover of red-hair woman, woman in jade hotel.

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Yellow-hair man in pool room, jian jun ding, traffic office, kailong jiang, hatchet man d, waiter of hotel, chuanren lin, locomotive prostitute, karaoke dancing girl, tongfu long, prison guard, zhonglan luo, luo's stepmother, critic reviews.

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‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ Review: 3D Movie With 55-Minute Long Take is the Revelation of This Year’s Cannes Film Festival

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First things first: Bi Gan ’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” has nothing to do with the Eugene O’Neil play of the same title, but that’s not the only misdirection in play. The Chinese director’s sophomore effort is a fascinating application of filmmaking innovation toward expressionistic ends. It follows up on the promise of his 40-minute long take in “Kaili Blues” with an even longer one, in 3D, set within the confines of a dream sequence that plays like a total revelation. Bi’s lyrical neo-noir begins with the poetic tale of a man returning to his hometown and searching for a long-lost love, then finds him putting his 3D glasses on at a movie theater — a cue for the audience to follow suit, as the movie launches into a staggering 55-minute long take shot entirely in 3D.

That gimmick might sound neat on paper, but it reaches a new level of cinematic intrigue as an immersive experience, unfolding within a surreal context that combines technical wizardry with high art. The unexpected love child of Wong Kar-wai and Andrei Tarkovsky, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” transforms from a lush, slow-burn pastiche to an audacious filmmaking gamble while maintaining the pictorial sophistication of its earlier section. It’s both languorous and eye-popping at once.

There are precedents for such acrobatic camerawork (“Russian Ark” comes to mind), but “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” adheres to its own precise rhythms, with the gall to spend over an hour building up to its main conceit. At first, the story takes the form of a leisurely potboiler, revolving around Luo (Huang Jute), a moody loner who offers pensive voiceovers as he reminisces about his time in Kaili and the significance of his return. He recalls his romance with the long-lost Wan Quiwen (Tang Wei) and wanders the rainy streets, where neon signs dot the shadows like islands of the past. Flashing back to 2000, he relives a gritty showdown with a local thug (Chen Yongzhong) and the trauma of a murder of old friend Wildcat (Lee Hong-Chi). But these narrative threads drift past like fragments of experiences that Luo can’t fully pull together. “Memory rusts,” he says, establishing the mood of a movie that depicts exactly that.

In between swooning shots of courtship and wanderings through lonely corridors, Luo seems content to drift indefinitely through his old stomping grounds, reliving the echoes of the past with every footstep. But everyday moments have nothing on his dreams. As Luo enters a 3D world and dozes off, the audience goes with him, and then the journey really begins.

Veering off to another dimension, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” reboots in a murky cave, where Luo finds a mysterious younger version of Wildcat. The pair ride out of the narrow confines and into an expansive terrain, the camera tracking alongside them, before Luo latches on to a ramshackle zipline and careens into a small encampment where he encounters another variation on the woman from his past. Bi’s camera hums along, turns on unexpected axes, and often sits still for minutes on end as Luo continues his Kafkesque trip toward an unspecified destination.

The astonishing craftsmanship generating a persistent hypnotic quality, and the circumstances guarantee that nothing — particularly the laws of physics — will adhere to a predictable trajectory. When Luo roughs up a couple young hooligans at a pool table, the moment requires a feat of timing that has led more than one viewer to hold their breath. At one point, the characters take flight, and the drifting footage (presumably taken by a drone) reorients the movie’s perspective all over again. Memories, after all, do as they please.

Bi’s camera doesn’t tell a story in traditional terms, but its narrative foundation provides just enough character details to catapult into bracing unknown terrain. It’s not always an emotionally pleasing experience, and the minimalist plot leads to some redundant observations, but those are minor quibbles in a movie engineered to reorient the spectator. At the Cannes Film Festival, where cinema is mostly celebrated as a fixed medium of shots and cuts, “Long Day’s Journey” premiered as a delicious surprise by providing a unique alternative — moving images that transform the real world into a higher plane of awareness, in which the camera has the power to liberate the eye from its physical constraints and enter a grab bag of possibilities.

Luo’s a tough guy who fights through the night to find the answers plaguing him at every turn, but the movie suggests that no solution can match the ethereal beauty of searching for meaning as the night wears on. In this masterful directing gamble, the camera peers deep into its protagonist’s soul, and finds a whole universe lurking in its confines. For the first hour, viewers may feel silly holding onto glasses that they have no reason to wear; by the end, they’ll want to keep them on for good.

“Long Day’s Journey Into Night” premiered at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival. It is currently seeking distribution. 

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A Speed Date With Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Everyone is scared of Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Even Eugene O’Neill: Once he had written this “play of old sorrow,” he locked the script in a vault and instructed his heirs not to publish it until 25 years after his death. His widow overruled him almost immediately, resurrecting O’Neill both as a force in the American theater (he won a posthumous Pulitzer in 1957 for Long Day’s ) and as a genius, after audiences and critics had dismissed him from the pantheon . Something in this too-private, too-honest masterpiece rolled the stone from his tomb.

Protected by what he thought would be a quarter-century of secrecy, O’Neill barely disguised the O’Neills as the Tyrones: His father, the blowhard, skinflint theater idol James; his mother, Mary, drifting back into morphine addiction; his charming older brother Jamie drinking himself to death; and himself, renamed Edmund — the youngest, raddled with tuberculosis and his family’s curdled hopes. The operatic play condenses their tragedy to one summer day, the day the family learns Mary has relapsed and Edmund gets his chilling diagnosis.

For the Audible-produced version now at the intimate Minetta Lane Theatre, director Robert O’Hara and his company (led by the theatrical power couple Bill Camp and Elizabeth Marvel) have made some daring adjustments to make it less of an intimidating, unassailable monument. They’ve pared it down and sped it up, performing it in two intermissionless hours instead of the usual three and a half. They’ve also contemporized the setting from 1912 to 2020, using design — Clint Ramos litters their Connecticut house with Clorox wipes and Amazon boxes — and clever cutting. They eliminate the maid, Cathleen, so now Mary (Marvel) reminisces to an empty house instead of a chatty Irish girl, and they’ve swept out many period phrases and literary allusions. This last choice does leave the brothers Edmund and Jamie without much to say to each other, since poetry was their shared love. But Swinburne and Wilde date. So out they go.

The show’s casting also disrupts old ideas of the characters, suggesting new avenues of meaning. Camp, king of the character actors, takes on the matinee idol James, while Marvel, always a tower of evident strength onstage, must find a way to dissolve as Mary. Jason Bowen plays the dissipated Jamie as a noisy drunk instead of a weak one, and Ato Blankson-Wood’s wry Edmund is, unusually, a little cool to his family’s pain, rather than a thin-skinned reflection of it. O’Hara has said that the casting has been colorblind rather than color-conscious, but there’s something pointed in watching a white James shout at his two Black sons about riding his coattails. Casting without regard for type also makes some illuminating against-the-grain readings possible. For instance, according to O’Neill, the real James sold and cheapened his talent, corrupting his theatrical gift to make money. Every other James I’ve seen obeys the playwright’s description: they boom Shakespeare quotes at their children in the plummy voice of a man-turned-ham. But Camp’s a trickster and dazzler in every moment, and when he says those same lines, we think, God , he’s good. What if everyone believes he’s a joke, but secretly he’s not? As with other hints of hope, it just tightens the tragedy’s noose.

The family’s drama of four-way blame and regret doesn’t progress so much as it grinds down; it’s a dirge, written with the dogged, repetitious rhythms of addiction and self-delusion. Each family member has at least one monologue that’s like an aria — they cannot stop confessing and remembering and tearing one another apart. Given all this language, a modernization, even where carefully thought through, will bump against its original circumstances. We roll with it for a long time, though, untroubled at first when Edmund’s tuberculosis is conflated with COVID, nodding at how precisely Mary’s addiction maps onto the modern opioid crisis. There are plenty of places in which the updating gives us something new and precious, something fresh to consider about this old, frightening story. In the final quarter, though, as we hear more about the particulars of the family’s medical issues, this mapping slips.

Perhaps we notice the anachronisms because the production’s electricity dims in the last section. Marvel’s exquisitely observed performance of an addict losing touch fingertip by fingertip is riveting, but eventually the text shifts towards Edmund, and the show hasn’t quite worked out his role. At first it seems that we are turning from COVID and opioids to another 2020 problem: isolated young people’s precarious mental health. But after its inventive treatment of addiction, here it falters. Even in the brothers’ theoretically climactic scene, in which Jamie snatches his support away from the desperate Edmund, O’Hara doesn’t give Blankson-Wood and Bowen the same choreographic or emotional attention that he does the rest of the production. The actors are at sea, and though Bowen does some excellent drunk acting, their moments together don’t strike deep notes.

Some of the second-half stumbling lies in design choices (a weird glowing skeleton projection throws things off the rails) and orchestration — O’Hara and sound designer Palmer Hefferan allow some of the actors, murmuring in contemporary cinematic style, to get too mumbly for too long. (It’s called Audible, dammit.) The root-and-branch editing also start to have an effect: O’Neill’s odd, bulky dramaturgy does have a logic, and as we move towards the ending, we start to feel all O’Hara’s cuts as a loss of mass; the original’s monumentality may have been what gave the play momentum.

Tragedians of the American mid-century — O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller — tended to write about themselves as sensitive young men, telling us just how their monstrous parents screwed them up. A revival such as this, held in a new position against modern light, casts that self-regard into shadow — by shifting the emphasis, completely, to the parents. They fight so hard for each other! O’Hara begins the evening with an extended, silent preshow scene: as dawn breaks, Marvel does yoga in the living room, while Camp ambles around with a takeout breakfast in a bag, winking at her and laughing happily under his breath. The silent minutes tick by, but everyone from O’Hara to the couple onstage to the audience clearly want to stretch this sweet sequence out for as long as possible. For that long instant we bask in their hard-won, casual joy; they’ve clearly come through a trial and believe they’re on the other side. What’s more, Camp and Marvel make us briefly believe that this time their warmth might actually outlast the darkness. Maybe this is the show where James and Mary finally win! It’s so easy to picture: It would never have to be night, and they could stay in this long, beautiful day forever.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is at the Minetta Lane Theatre through February 20.

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Long Day’s Journey Into Night review: Brian Cox’s tyrannical Tyrone is a masterclass in impotent rage

The ‘succession’ star returns to his stage stomping ground, and it’s where he stomps best. alongside an extraordinary patricia clarkson, he owns the stage in jeremy herrin’s spare, bleak – and very long – revival of eugene o’neill’s masterpiece, article bookmarked.

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God, this is a miserable play. For three and a half hours, the four members of the Tyrone family – a morphine addict, two alcoholics and a consumptive – shout and mope and recriminate, and director Jeremy Herrin really leans into the misery in his bleak, spare production of Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece.

So why would anyone want to sit through 210 minutes of such sustained despair? Well, first there’s the acting. It’s one of those plays that needs a mighty pair in the lead roles of James and Mary Tyrone, he a once-famous actor who is now a whiskey-guzzling miser, she a bitter morphine addict. Lesley Manville and Jeremy Irons have done it , so have Charles Dance and Jessica Lange. This time it’s over to American movie star Patricia Clarkson and the beast that is Brian Cox as James, with Cox reminding us all, after the success of Succession , that the stage is his old stomping ground – and it’s where he stomps best.

There’s also the fact that, 85 years after it was written, Long Day’s Journey remains an incredibly astute account of addiction and of the impact it has on a family. “I’ve become such a liar,” says Mary. “I never lied about anything once upon a time. Now I have to lie, especially to myself. One day, long ago, I found I could no longer call my soul my own.”

It’s such a big machine of a play that it takes a while for the wheels to start moving, but once the initial creaks and jerks are out of the way, it’s an unrelenting plummet. It’s all there in the desolation of Lizzie Clachan’s set, three recessing rooms that get gloomier the further back you go. The few bits of furniture are all scrubbed to bare pale wood, the walls a washed-out grey, the lighting increasingly weak and white. With so little there, the production becomes a kind of specimen box, the Tyrone family like creatures under a microscope – and we watch them drive themselves to despair. Herrin turns this into a showcase for Big Acting, with no distractions.

Cox makes Tyrone a tyrant, barking and roaring, flaring into rage at the slightest provocation, simmering down just as quickly, and all the while his family don’t pay him the slightest bit of notice. He rages, Lear-like, impotent, and just as quickly becomes a tender husband, staring with deep love into his wife’s eyes.

Clarkson, meanwhile, has an extraordinary ability to flitter in and out of reality, sometimes just with her eyes. One moment they’re piercing into the person she’s talking to, fully lucid; the next they’re staring blankly as she loses herself in her memories. With just a faint smile, she becomes almost diaphanous, a drifting, spectral presence on stage. You can’t keep your eyes off those two.

Laurie Kynaston and Daryl McCormack take on the roles of the sons, Edmund and Jamie – one a morbid poet, the other a self-loathing alcoholic actor. The way they draw on threads of their parents is clever: Kynaston’s Edmund has some of the swagger of his dad, while McCormack’s Jamie has the same inwardness as his mum. Meanwhile, Louisa Harland (Orla from Derry Girls ) does brilliantly as the Irish maid Cathleen, tuning down some of the elements that can make her character a comic stereotype.

By no means is this a perfect production. The stripped-back approach is really exposing, and there are moments when it doesn’t bear up to the scrutiny, especially in the whiskey-heavy later scenes. You miss the heft, too, when neither Cox nor Clarkson is on stage – less a criticism of the sons than a testament to the hypnotic skill of the parents – and some scenes in the second half feel bum-numbingly long. And it’s not exactly an enjoyable night out at the theatre, either. What it is, though, is very impressive, often mesmerising, and – when it hits right – profoundly moving.

Wyndham’s, until 8 June

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Movie Reviews

Moody, mesmeric chinese noir sends a man on a 'long day's journey into night'.

Mark Jenkins

Jue Huang stars in Long Day's Journey Into Night, which features an extended 3D sequence. Bai Linghai/Kino Lorber hide caption

Jue Huang stars in Long Day's Journey Into Night, which features an extended 3D sequence.

A haunted loner searches for a mysterious woman. That film-noir staple is the plot of Long Day's Journey Into Night — to the extent that this woozy, mesmerizing reverie has a plot. Chinese writer-director Bi Gan's second feature is primarily an autobiographical mood piece.

The movie's protagonist is Luo (Huang Jue), who packs a gun and a tough-guy resume. But he's a poetic sort of hooligan, inclined to muse in voiceover about dreams, memories — and their cousin, the movies. He's looking for beautiful Wan Quiwen ( Lust, Caution star Tang Wei), although there are hints that he's also wondering about his long-unseen mother.

In The Brutal Animated Film 'Have A Nice Day,' Nobody Does

Bi grew up in Kaili, a subtropical city in southwest China that appears in both his features. He was raised by his father while his mother worked in a distant location. This history is crucial to the director's films, although it's filtered through his cinematic enthusiasms. Journey's humid ambiance may reflect Kaili's climate, but the movie's flooded interiors and dripping sounds also recall Andrei Tarkovsky's Stalker , which Bi has acknowledged as a major influence.

Bi's 2015 Kaili Blues culminated in an unbroken 41-minute traveling shot. This time, the concluding single-shot sequence runs 55 minutes, and is meant to be seen in 3D. (I was unable to view the 3D version.)

Where Kaili Blues 's coda is clearly set in the real world, Journey 's final sequence is more surreal. Killing time in a bedraggled theater, Luo dons 3D glasses. Next thing he knows, he's in a mine like the one where an old friend was killed. After a ping-pong match, a boy leads him out of the tunnel and to a carnival in a dilapidated industrial site.

It's night, and the shadows are deep. Clocks and watches, as in Kaili Blues , don't keep real time. Repeatedly, Luo finds himself cornered or locked in. The camera is freewheeling — and even briefly airborne — but he is not.

In a pool hall near the karaoke stage, Luo meets someone who may be Wan Quiwen. "I'm not the woman you think I am," she says. Well, of course.

Her identity will remain a enigma. So, too, that of an older woman (Sylvia Chang) who appears briefly. Bi takes a few cues from the detective genre, but he's not intent on solving the case.

What matters is what has already happened, even if it can't be precisely recalled, not what transpires in front of the camera. The wisp of a story is really just the occasion for impressionistic musing and evocative picturing.

Exquisitely shot by three cinematographers, Journey doesn't attempt to simulate Luo's subjective view of the events. But the film (whose Chinese title is Last Evenings on Earth ) does regularly highlight the limitations of human vision. Light is reflected, refracted and diffused. The camera peers through glass — including the wire-reinforced window of a prison visitor's booth — and the murkily transparent vinyl of a night-market partition.

Appropriately, when the camera finally stops moving, it comes to rest on a light source. Journey 's stately waltz of movement and illumination ends by contemplating a flickering glow.

Film Review: ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’

'Kaili Blues' director Bi Gan delivers a languorous noir love story of superficial visual beauty, culminating in a nearly hour-long extended take.

By Maggie Lee

Chief Asia Film Critic

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Tracking a lovelorn drifter’s return to his hometown of Kaili in Southwest China, emerging independent auteur Bi Gan ’s sophomore feature “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is one long pose featuring a virtuoso long take, though the film itself comes up short in substance. Plunging viewers into an extended dream sequence in the name of abstract motifs such as memory, time, and space, the film is a lush plotless mood-piece swimming in artsy references and ostentatious technical exercises, with a star ( Tang Wei , “Lust, Caution”) as decoration. Diehard art-house fans and critics eager to scout new auteurs will deem it an ecstatic, transporting experience, but a general audience expecting to have a basic idea of what they’re watching will be left clutching at straws.

Bi’s debut “Kaili Blues” stunned the festival circuit with its unusual film language, capped by a bravura 40-minute take. Although made on a shoestring budget, the filmmaking possesses an untamed nature that mirrored the subtropical rural landscapes and the scruffy countryfolk longing for escape. For his second outing, Bi got the whole nine yards: big budget, international co-production, A-list actresses Tang and Sylvia Chang, a pedigree crew who work for the likes of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Wang Xiaoshuai.

Not surprisingly, there’s improvement in production quality, but in terms of creative development, there’s a feeling of déjà vu that carries over from the first film, as once again a road movie gradually morphs into an internal journey, featuring an even longer climactic take (this time in 3D), voiceover reciting the director’s own poetry, hints of a criminal past and some regret over an old love — only this time, everything is consciously stylized and obtuse in a way that alienates audiences rather than drawing them into his world.

Popular on Variety

After fleeing his hometown years ago, Luo Hongwu (Huang Jue, “The Master”) returns to find his father dead. He discovers a faded photo of a woman hidden inside his father’s old clock. Her identity keeps shifting as he makes his way in search of her whereabouts. Inside a dank tunnel, Luo has his first haunting encounter with a woman (Tang) in a resplendent emerald-green dress. She calls herself Wan Qiwen. The scenes presumably take place either in a dream or somewhere in his subconscious, and everything else that happens and every person Luo gets entangled with may be imaginary, or unreliable reconstructions of the past.

The film evokes a sense of film noir by weaving in some fragmented backstory about Luo and his childhood sidekick Wildcat (independent filmmaker Li Hongqi) who was murdered, and a mystery related to a gun (perhaps the weapon that killed Wildcat?). Wan too has ties with criminals through her mafia boss boyfriend. However, given the willfully obscure timelines and elliptical dialogue, nothing resembling a conventional plotline or character arc emerges. It can be a wonderful experience to surrender to a film’s mood or aesthetics, or to ponder its personal vision through moving images, but in this case, the choppy structure simply lacks forward momentum, especially the sleep-inducing first hour.

And then, around the 75-minute mark, Luo goes to a run-down movie house to watch a film — which happens to be in 3D. As soon as he puts on the glasses, the film shifts into 3D as well (finally giving audiences the chance to use the glasses they were given when they entered the theater), closing out the film with a nearly hour-long continuous take. It must be said that some of the cinematography by “Mustang” DP David Chizallet is marvelous. The sheer range and weirdness of activity such — which include a ping-pong match and a long, slow plunge down a cliff via a cable-car — foreground the difficult and elaborate camera setups.

However impressive, after using the long take in “Kaili Blues” to transform motion into a state of mind (as Bi followed his traveling protagonist with exhilarating footage on a motorbike or the back of a truck), repeating the technique feels less organic to the story this time around. While the former was mostly shot outdoors, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is largely confined to more static indoor scenes, emphasizing a conscious artificiality. The 3D adds depth and texture to the images but is not absolutely crucial.

Bi cites a truckload of artistic references and inspiration, from Chagall to Dante, from Billy Wilder to Modiano (whose short story “Last Evenings on Earth” is chosen as the Chinese title), but the connections are tenuous at best. Even the English title, borrowed from Eugene O’Neill’s play, doesn’t have much to do with the source.

Cinephiles will of course rhapsodize on the influence of Wong Kar-wai on the visual style, nostalgic songs, femmes fatales with retro haircuts, the theme of transience invoked by broken-clock motifs (it was a watch needing repair in “Kaili Blues”), and the staged poses of lovers in a permanent state of aroused but unrequited desire. But beyond the invitation to spot these references, what else do they say?

Transiting from a largely unprofessional cast culled locally from Kaili to big-name actors, Bi doesn’t so much coax performances out of them as bring out a range of standalone emotive facial expressions. A rugged man with a questionable past written on his face, Huang Jue (“The Master”) exudes an intriguing presence that helps gel the other disparate characters. Tang looks smoldering but has put in more engaging performances in other films, Chang appears in a cameo that could have gone to any number of veteran actresses. All three sound like they’re struggling to speak with a Guizhou accent.

Craft contributions are strong in some parts, especially Liu Qiang’s production design, which evokes the recesses of the mind through dark, underground sets like a coalmine shaft, a basement pool hall, and flooded chambers with leaking roofs and dripping walls reminiscent of Tsai Ming-liang locales. With its ethereal electronic touches, the score by Lim Giong and Point Hsu contributes most of the dreamlike tone intended. During the long 2D lead-up, atmospheric cinematography by Yao Hung-I and Dong Jinsong sets the tone for the extended set piece that culminates the film.

Reviewed at Cannes Film Festival (Un certain regard), May 15, 2018. Running time: 143 MIN. (Original title: “Di Qiu Zui Hou De Ye Wan.”)

• Production: (China-France) A so-and-so release of a Zhejiang Huace Film & TV Co., Dangmai Films (Shanghai) Co., Huace Pictures (Tianjin) Co. production. (International sales: Wild Bunch, Paris.) Producers: Shan Zuolong. Executive producers: Wan Juan, Shen Yang. Co-producers: Charles Gillibert, Yeh Jufeng, Li Xiaonan, Zhang Guanren.
• Crew: Director, writer: Bi Gan. Camera (color, 3D) Yao Hung-I, Dong Jinsong, David Chizallet. Editor: Qin Yanan. Music: Lim Giong, Point Hsu.
• With: Tang Wei, Huang Jue Sylvia Chang, Lee Hong-chi, Chen Yongzhong, Luo Feiyang. (In Guizhou dialect)

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Movies | ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ review: Not…

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Movies | ‘long day’s journey into night’ review: not that one. a different, dreamlike, chinese one..

If we can’t make room on our planet of avengers, and games of thrones, for a shape-shifting rumination on time and loss and memory such as Bi Gan’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” then we’re writing our own obituary for cinema and image-making as we know it.

Although, honestly: What do we know for sure anymore? Right now, we’re living in an age of fan service bordering on enslavement. The raging rivers of “content” (miserable word) rarely slow down long enough for anything making form, or risk, a priority. A film as defiantly peculiar and visually entrancing as this one does not float by very often.

“Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is playing at a single Chicago theater this week, the AMC River East, in 3-D. Nearly the entire second half of the 133-minute running time is taken up with a 3D film-within-a-film sequence, scrambling the themes and performers of the first half and eventually dissolving into a rapturous kiss. It’s a sustained single shot lasting nearly an hour, tracking this way and that, through a village square, up close to a karaoke performance, into an abandoned mine shaft. No digital futzing here. All real. This one’s worth seeing in 3-D.

A destabilized film noir set in China’s subtropical, perpetually rainy Guizhou province, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” (unrelated — and how! — to the Eugene O’Neill play) floats along in a self-made trance. Its taciturn protagonist, played by Huang Jue, returns to his hometown of Kaili (he used to manage a casino in Burma, we’re told) to retrieve fragments, feelings, from his past.

He’s trying to find a woman, played by Tang Wei, who knew him when, and left him wondering why. She’s now under the thumb of a karaoke-loving gangster. Meantime our searcher is pulled backwards through the writer-director’s mazelike narrative structure to find out about the fate of his deceased friend Wildcat. Already I’m risking making Bi’s riddle sound more conventionally plotted than it is. Rather, this reverie swims in a world of images, not a series of linear sequences clicking into place.

The trappings of “Long Day’s Journey” are unafraid of Old Hollywood cliché; in murmured voiceover, Jue tells us he has an addiction to “danger.” The sense of melancholy seeps into every lengthy take, along with the precipitation. We spend much of Bi’s dreamscape in pool halls, or in an abandoned mine shaft, or simply watching the man gazing at the love of his life (if she’s even meant to be a realistic depiction, as opposed to a romantic ideal). The boundaries and parameters are abstract, but Bi’s compositions are as precise as a diamond cutter’s hands.

The influences at work range far and widely, from Wong Kar-Wai’s brilliant saturations of color, to Andrei Tarkovsky’s beguiling timebends, to the floating lovers found in paintings by Marc Chagall. Three different cinematographers worked on “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and yet the results feel like a single, sustained puzzle that comes together on its own terms.

The film was a big success for exactly one week in China, marketed as a one-of-a-kind romance and released on New Year’s Eve. Then came a flurry of what-the-hell-was-that? vexations on social media and a sudden dropoff in ticket sales. In America, “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” is staking out a limited release, distributed by Kino Lorber, and even that is something of a miracle. Bi, not yet 30, has made a movie that feels like a visual sigh and, yes, a dream. It’s a reminder of just how expansive the cinema’s boundaries remain.

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

[email protected]

Twitter @phillipstribune.com

“Long Day’s Journey Into Night” — 3.5 stars

No MPAA rating

Running time : 2:13. In Mandarin with English subtitles.

Opens : Friday at the AMC River East 21, 322 E. Illinois St., Chicago

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Review: ‘Long Day’s Journey Into Night’ Is a Tempest in a Bourbon Bottle

By Ben Brantley

• April 27, 2016

A violent storm front has moved into the American Airlines Theater , where Jonathan Kent’s static, star-packed revival of Eugene O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” opened on Wednesday night, and like so much of our weather these days, it seems to be human-made. It may be the special-effects team that’s generating all that moody fog and wind. But it’s Gabriel Byrne, Jessica Lange, Michael Shannon and John Gallagher Jr. who are providing the thunder and lightning.

I mean the histrionic kind, of course, the sort of heavy-weather acting you associate with the distant era in which James Tyrone, the aging, grandstanding matinee idol played (very effectively) by Mr. Byrne, ruled as a king of the stage. Voices are raised, lapels are grabbed, fate is cursed, backs are turned, shoulders are squared, and bodies are sent tumbling to the floor.

Yet you can’t avoid the feeling that this tempestuous climate is artificially controlled. All of the leading performers in this production are proven powerhouses. They all have at least moments of the probing intensity that they’ve shown in their previous work. And Mr. Byrne serves one of the most subtle, fine-grained slices of theatrical ham on record.

You don’t doubt that, if called upon, the cast members could draw up meticulous charts of the motivations of the damaged souls they embody. What you do doubt, as you watch them have at one another onstage, is that they are members of the same family, bound by blood ties that will ultimately strangle them.

That, unfortunately, is an omission that can make “Long Day’s Journey” feel even longer than it is. (The current version clocks in at 3 hours 45 minutes.) A friend of mine, a writer who saw this Roundabout Theater Company production in previews, said she hadn’t remembered the play being so relentlessly talky and repetitive. “O’Neill could have used a good editor,” she said.

But with an ideal production of “Long’s Day Journey,” you shouldn’t feel that a syllable is inessential. The singular strength of this merciless yet compassionate work, closely modeled on O’Neill’s own savagely unhappy clan and set on one devastating day in 1912 in a run-down Connecticut summer house, lies in its cadenced cycle of recrimination and forgiveness, of attack and retreat and renewed attack.

Damning, wounding words are spoken and retracted and then respoken — again and again and again — by members of a family for whom home is both an unattainable fantasy and a very real living hell.

O’Neill may have modeled his historical trilogy “Mourning Becomes Electra” on Aeschylus’ “Oresteia.” But it’s with “Long Day’s Journey” (written in the early 1940s but not staged until 1956, after his death) that he most successfully translated the fatalism of Greek tragedy into latter-day naturalism. When James Tyrone Sr., the weary father of the home under consideration, speaks of “a curse she can’t escape,” he’s referring to his wife, Mary (Ms. Lange), and her dependence on morphine.

Yet what really condemns this couple and their two sons, Jamie (Mr. Shannon) and Edmund (Mr. Gallagher), to unending unhappiness is another addiction, which they all share. I don’t mean the men’s excessive fondness for whiskey; that’s only a provisional escape from that other, greater addiction: the family members’ angry interdependence on one another, and their unassuageable hunger for blame and absolution.

When we meet the Tyrones, they have arrived at a definite crisis point: Edmund, the younger son, is ill, probably with consumption, and Mary has returned to using the opiate she was weaned from in a recent stay in a sanitarium. But we should also feel that what’s happening is merely an exaggeration of daily family patterns ineradicably rooted in the past.

The sense that the Tyrones are haunted by their own ghosts is established even before this production begins. Tom Pye’s set is first seen as a forbiddingly empty place, animated by eerie, rippling light (by Natasha Katz) and windblown white curtains. The same translucent curtains are drawn fluidly over the set between scenes, suggestive of time both forever passing and framed and frozen in memory.

It is Mary who says: “The past is the present isn’t it? It’s the future, too.” Both spectral and very much of the flesh, a conscious fading beauty in Jane Greenwood’s fitted Victorian dresses, Ms. Lange is physically ideal for Mary and much better matched to her part than she was as Amanda in Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie,” her last Broadway outing in 2005.

This Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress, who played Mary in London in 2000, has the tools to create a definitive portrait of the character, on a par with more idiosyncratic interpretations by Vanessa Redgrave (on Broadway) and Laurie Metcalf (in London). Her voice seesaws between soprano girlish affection and contralto hostility in a single sentence, and more than other Marys I’ve seen, she is endowed with a robust, uneasy sensuality.

You can feel Ms. Lange giving her all to each of her big set pieces, but they often feel too exquisitely self-contained, like coloratura arias in an opera. Ms. Lange is often acting beautifully, but she is also often palpably acting. And her final soliloquy is stretched self-indulgently thin.

As the sensitive, poetic Edmund, Mr. Gallagher is loud and joltingly contemporary. He feels so distanced from the others that his character seems to have nothing at stake here.

The ever-vital Mr. Shannon (currently on screen as Elvis Presley in “Elvis and Nixon” ) wears his towering tallness with an apologetic slump and a defensive New York cockiness, and he brings a delicious, barbed comic mastery to Jamie’s climactic drunk scene. But did I believe he was related to anyone else onstage? (The play’s fifth character, Cathleen, the Tyrone’s maid, registers as a stock comic Irishwoman, as played by Colby Minifie.)

As the selfish, scared Tyrone Sr., Mr. Byrne gives such a beautiful performance — a haunted and haunting incarnation of fraying majesty — that, for once, I found myself waiting eagerly for his character’s windy, self-explanatory monologue in the second half. That’s the one in which he speaks of the road not taken in his acting career, when he chose commercial over artistic success.

“Waste” is a word that he uses ruefully and frequently, as befits a man who lives in irrational fear of the poor house. But there’s not a wasted gesture or inflection in Mr. Byrne’s performance. (Watch, for example, how he hides his wallet when he takes money from it.) His character, an emblem of squandered potential, paradoxically turns out to provide this disjunctive production with its one memorable instance of great potential fulfilled.

A theater review on Thursday about “Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” at the American Airlines Theater in Manhattan, misidentified the character who has a climactic drunk scene. He is Jamie, not Edmund. The review also misstated the name of the maid played by Colby Minifie. She is Cathleen, not Bridget. And the review misstated the year Jessica Lange played Mary Tyrone in London. It was 2000, not 2012.

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Long Day’s Journey Into NightBy Eugene O’Neill; directed by Jonathan Kent; sets by Tom Pye; costumes by Jane Greenwood; lighting by Natasha Katz; sound by Clive Goodwin; hair and wig design by Tom Watson; dialect coach, Stephen Gabis; fight director, J. David Brimmer; production stage manager, Peter Lawrence; production manager, Aurora Productions; general manager, Denise Cooper; associate managing director, Steve Dow; associate artistic director, Scott Ellis. Presented by Roundabout Theater Company, Todd Haimes, artistic director; Harold Wolper, managing director; Julia C. Levy, executive director; Sydney Beers, general manager; in association with Ryan Murphy. Through June 26 at the American Airlines Theater, 227 West 42nd Street, Manhattan; 212-719-1300, roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 3 hours 40 minutes. WITH: Jessica Lange (Mary Cavan Tyrone), Gabriel Byrne (James Tyrone), Michael Shannon (James Tyrone Jr.), John Gallagher Jr. (Edmund Tyrone) and Colby Minifie (Cathleen).

Mark Grassick / 25 March 2024

Review: Long Day’s Journey Into Night

Brian Cox and Patricia Clarkson lead an impressive cast in Jeremy Herrin's production of Eugene O'Neill's masterpiece

There’s no shortage of domestic dysfunction in the arts. From Thomas Vintenberg’s Festen to Jesse Armstrong’s Succession and The Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree , the awful ways blood traumatises blood have played out in every form imaginable. On the stage, it’s an even more potent brew, offering the perfect opportunity to trap a family in a single setting and have them let loose on each other, like a WWE cage fight if you swapped out piledrivers for passive aggressive barbs.

Few would dispute that, even in a genre that includes A Doll’s House , True West and Death Of A Salesman , Eugene O’Neill’s mostly autobiographical Long Day’s Journey Into Night reigns supreme. Its content is so raw and eviscerating that O’Neill requested it not be even published until 25 years after his death (his wife waited three years in the end). But while the lens he turns on his stingy, critical father, morphine-addicted mother and bitter, alcoholic brother is unflinching, what elevates it to greatness is his compassion. Over the course of its three hours, Long Day’s Journey Into Night unpicks the complicated fibres of these people and finds understanding and forgiveness in the bleakest of situations.

The play takes place over a single day in a single room of the Tyrone family’s shabby summer home. Youngest son Edmund (a stand-in for O’Neill himself) has an unshakeable “summer cold”, matriarch Mary is bouncing back after a stay in a sanitorium to cure her morphine addiction, while father James and eldest son Jamie drink whiskey and drive each other into fits of rage with their mere existence. The tension is palpable. It’s obvious Edmund’s illness is far more serious than Mary can stand to admit and her fragile state has the rest of the family on tenterhooks as they creep around her, watching for signs of a relapse.

The casting for Jeremy Herrin’s stripped-back take on this storied play is undoubtedly a big reason why every seat in Wyndham’s is occupied. The great Patricia Clarkson plays Mary, Daryl McCormack ( Bad Sisters , Good Luck To You, Leo Grande ) plays Jamie and Laurie Kynaston ( How To Build A Girl , Fool Me Once ) plays Edmund. Louisa Harland, who is rapidly emerging even beyond her Derry Girls fame, steals scenes with rambling comic timing as maid Cathleen. But the central draw has to be the casting of TVs most notoriously brutal patriarch as James Tyrone.

Even though Brian Cox will never not be Logan Roy (every explosion of temper is genuinely frightening when you’re in the same room as him), his James Tyrone is a very different man. Yes, he spends a great deal of time barking from the corner with a glass of amber liquid in his hand, but as Tyrone, his brutal criticisms don’t come from the same pit of cruel disdain. This is an even more complicated man, one whose every barbed comment could just as easily be addressed to a mirror.

Cox is magnificent, but is matched all the way by his co-stars. Their group dynamic feels so lived-in that the pain they inflict on each other is at times difficult to endure. Clarkson becomes almost translucent by the end, withdrawing into herself as every façade falls away, while McCormack continues his journey towards becoming a very big deal indeed.

In truth though, the play belongs to Laurie Kynaston. Edmund is the focus of so much of the family’s cruel, twisted love and Kynaston embodies each shift in his character, each adjustment he makes to accommodate his family, each flinch as a careless criticism hits home. His magnetic presence and subtle performance drill deep into the heart of the play, eliciting and reflecting the painful empathy that runs through O’Neill’s work. At one point, his rough-hewn hobo-esque appearance begs the question: was Chalamet really the best choice to play Bob Dylan?

There have been countless famous productions of Long Day’s Journey Into Night , from Olivier as James Tyrone in 1971 to Jason Robards on Broadway in 1988 to Jeremy Irons and Lesley Manville in Bristol in 2016. It’s impossible to think that this production and this cast aren’t destined to join that illustrious firmament.

Long Day’s Journey Into Night is at Wyndham’s until 8 June 2024. Get tickets here

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Laszlo nemes feature ‘orphan’ sets june start for budapest shoot as charades & new europe team to co-sell – cannes market, jessica lange & ed harris wrap new movie version of ‘long day’s journey into night’.

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Filming has wrapped on an under-the-radar screen adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer prize-winning play, Long Day’s Journey Into Night , starring Jessica Lange , Ed Harris , Ben Foster and Colin Morgan.

Well known British theater and opera director, Jonathan Kent, has made his feature directorial debut on the project, which has been filming in Ireland. Above is a first image from the production.

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Foster will play their wayward, charming and hard-drinking elder son, Jamie. And Colin Morgan (Belfast) is the bleakly optimistic and consumptive younger son, Edmund – a portrait of O’Neill himself. David Lindsay-Abaire ( Poltergeist ) adapted the play for screen.

Set on one single day in August 1912 at the family’s Connecticut seaside home, the story follows the Tyrone family as it faces the looming dual spectres of Edmund’s potentially fatal consumption diagnosis alongside his mother Mary’s increasingly fragile and anxious state of mind. The family knows that the situation threatens to return her to the severe morphine addiction that was only recently overcome.

Filmed on location in County Wicklow, Ireland, the film is financed by Magnoliamae Films, BKStudios, Brouhaha Entertainment and Fetisoff Illusion. It is produced by Gabrielle Tana ( Philomena ), Bill Kenwright ( Cheri ) and Gleb Fetisov ( Loveless ).

As first reported by the Irish Times, filming was briefly halted after just a few days when a financier unexpectedly exited the project but those issues were resolved soon after when BKStudios stepped in.

Executive producers are BKStudios’ CEO, David Gilbery ( The Lost Daughter ), and head of production is Naomi George ( My Pure Land ). The film is co-produced with Redmond Morris and his Irish production company Four Provinces Films.

Eugene O’Neill’s classic play has been adapted multiple times for the big and small screen including versions by Sidney Lumet and Jonathan Miller.

Lange is repped by CAA and Untitled Entertainment; Ed Harris by CAA and Ziffren Brittenham LLP; Ben Foster by United Talent Agency; Colin Morgan by United Agents.

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Long Day's Journey Into Night, Wyndham's Theatre review - O'Neill masterwork is once again driven by its Mary | reviews, news & interviews

Long day's journey into night, wyndham's theatre review - o'neill masterwork is once again driven by its mary, patricia clarkson powers the latest iteration of this great, grievous american drama.

Memory is a confounding thing. By way of proof, just ask the Mary Tyrone who is being given unforgettable life by Patricia Clarkson in London's latest version of Long Day's Journey into Night , which has arrived on the West End (and at the same theatre) a mere six years after the previous version of Eugene O'Neill's posthumously premiered masterwork; that one headlined a top-rank Lesley Manville in the same part.

Arthritic and lonely, Mary looks towards a past where she was "so happy, for a time", away from the crushing realities of the present. Those include a consumptive young son, Edmund (Laurie Kynaston), bound for a sanatorium, and a husband of 35 years, James (Brian Cox, pictured below, left ), whose miserliness has inflicted incalculable damage.

But once again, one is aware of the wounded Mary dominating even in her absence, as she draws the men in her orbit near in order to continually catch them offguard.

Which Mary will her husband and sons find the next time she enters the sparsely furnished wooden living room, itself austerely designed by Lizzie Clachan so as to connect up visually with the recesses of the mind? (In other contexts, it would make a good sauna.) It's impossible to predict, but Clarkson is in command of this difficult role from first to last, her final moments bringing her the very lip of the stage as if to impress the urgency of her situation directly upon the audience. The fourth wall is shattered, as is Mary's mind. 

At first, Clarkson's voice seems oddly flat, but you soon clock her vocal timbre as a defense mechanism to keep too much emotion from seeping through too quickly. Whereas the great Jessica Lange, a Tony winner for this same part several years ago on Broadway, was more overtly musical in her delivery, and more cajoling, Clarkson gradually lays bare the psychic abyss that Mary inhabits and the gathering mixture of truths and falsehoods that she has made of her current half-life. 

Stricken by thoughts of a tubercular father and a younger son, Edmund, who says famously of himself that he is "a little bit in love with death", Mary finds company of sorts in the family maid Cathleen, whom Louisa Harland ( pictured below ) plays with unusual vigour: her own fondness for drink is clearly of a piece with that of her employers. But you all the while clock in Mary a deep love for her abject husband that is at the same time tempered by anxiety and perhaps even anger; her mood swings, one senses, are in their own way all about control. 

I've always had a particular fondness for the great scene late on where the parents vacate the stage and leave the two boys, Jamie and Edmund, to have at one another and excavate more home truths in the process. (Seared on my memory forever are Peter Gallagher and Kevin Spacey in these roles nearly 40 years ago.) 

Kynaston and, especially, McCormack do that encounter proud, the latter propelled by booze to confess an inner malignancy accompanying a son more or less dismissed by his own father as a whoremongering barfly: you sense in the excellent McCormack a rage that hasn't found rest. Edmund is the sensitive soul who can quote Baudelaire, but Kynaston communicates a keen-eyed awareness in step with an assemblage for whom lacerations are the collective lingua franca. Interestingly, two actors were previously cast in this part in this production, both of whom stepped away, but there's no sense whatsoever of Kynaston as a late arrival.

Still, I'm with James and Jamie and Edmund in awaiting every footstep of Mary, whether she is actually in the room or lowering overhead, unseen, within the claustrophobic Monte Cristo Cottage in Connecticut where this Nobel laureate's play is set. (The home is referenced in the text as "this shabby place".) And as the day turns to night and the characters' demons emerge, you're once again reminded of the formidable power of this woman at her most fragile: the tyranny of the weak restored once more to tremulous life.

• Long Day's Journey into Night at Wyndham's Theatre to June 8
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Long Day's Journey Into Night

A man went back to Guizhou, found the tracks of a mysterious woman. He recalls the summer he spent with her twenty years ago. A man went back to Guizhou, found the tracks of a mysterious woman. He recalls the summer he spent with her twenty years ago. A man went back to Guizhou, found the tracks of a mysterious woman. He recalls the summer he spent with her twenty years ago.

• Sylvia Chang
• 66 User reviews
• 92 Critic reviews
• 88 Metascore
• 12 wins & 38 nominations

• Wan Qiwen …

• Wildcat's Mom …

• Zuo Hongyuan
• Wildcat (Childhood)

• Ex-husband of Wan Qiwen
• Woman Prisoner
• Lover of Red-hair Woman

• Woman in Jade Hotel

• Traffic Police
• (as Ming Dow)
• Yellow-hair Man in Pool Room
• Traffic Office
• Hatchet Man D
• Waiter of Hotel
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• Karaoke Dancing Girl
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• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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• Trivia The marketing of the film was met with major controversy after its opening. The marketing of this art film was targeted massively towards the general public, instead of art film lovers. The film opened on December 31, 2018 since it was the last day of the year and it was intended to be "a good event to celebrate the new year". It was estimated that a lot of people went to see the film without knowing that this is an art house film. This resulted in major backlash as netizens complained against the film, as well as calling the ones who appreciated it "jia wenyi (phony-artistic)". The film earned 38 million USD on the first day of opening, yet the box office of the second day was decreased by 96%.

Lu Hongwu : Dreams rise up and I wonder if my body is made of hydrogen. And then my memories would be made of stone.

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User reviews 66

• Mar 20, 2019
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• December 31, 2018 (China)
• Anticipate Pictures (Singapore)
• Bac Films (France)
• Long Day's Journey into Night
• Beijing Herui FIlm Culture
• Dangmai Films (Shanghai)
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• CN¥40,000,000 (estimated)
• Apr 14, 2019
• $42,140,994

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 18 minutes

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