The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
Jack Clayton (1987)
This adaptation of Brian Moore’s novel has considerable strengths, including a superb performance by Maggie Smith as the title character, although the weakly optimistic ending is unsatisfying. The book was published in 1955 and the story it told was contemporary. The sets and clothes in Jack Clayton’s film also suggest the fifties but the screenwriter Peter Nelson has set the action in Dublin rather than in Moore’s Belfast – a transposition which may have been influenced by the political sensitivity of Northern Ireland at the time the film was made but which is useful also in emphasising the dominating position of the Catholic church in the life of Judith and other dramatis personae. Judith (Judy) Hearne is a middle-aged spinster, who moves from one boarding house tenancy to the next. She has a few pieces of good jewellery, inherited from an aunt, but she pays the rent with money earned from giving piano lessons. Any change she spends on alcohol. Judy’s itinerancy, the precariousness of her income and her tendency to hit the bottle are interconnected. At the start of the film, she has just moved to new lodgings. One morning, she arrives late for a piano lesson (it’s not hard to guess what caused her to oversleep) and her pupil’s mother explains that Judy’s services are no longer required – the mother has ‘heard stories’, which Judy vainly dismisses as lies. What makes Judith Hearne (the original title of Moore’s novel) such a remarkable character study is that Judy, despised as an old maid and mocked for her eccentric appearance and genteel pretensions (she asks for ‘a soupçon’ of milk in her tea), is well aware that she’s ridiculed – and that there’s nothing she can do to change either the way she is or the way that other people see her.
This scenario doesn’t suggest much potential for an eventful story but there is one: Judith Hearne describes, in the words of an obituary of Brian Moore (who died in 1999), its protagonist’s ‘desperate last attempts at finding love and companionship’. Judy strikes up a friendship with James Madden, the brother of her latest landlady, Mrs Rice. The relationship is based on a shared misunderstanding of each other’s finances. Madden, recently returned to Dublin after living for thirty years in New York (where he worked in jobs more menial than he pretends), spots Judy’s ruby rings and, he supposes, a source of funds for his latest business venture. Judy, impressed by Madden’s man-of-the-worldliness and frightened of getting old alone, takes his American-accented blarney at face value and sees him as someone who can provide for them both. Judy is a devout Catholic. The first time the less than devout Madden accompanies her to mass, they sit together in the pew and both briefly speak their minds to the audience – telling us how they see each other. Madden regretfully disparages Judy’s looks; she his vulgar clothes and manner. This is a good move by Jack Clayton in that it complicates what we might otherwise have taken to be very simple foolishness on the part of both Judy and Madden. Although mutually deluded, they don’t see each other as paragons. They recognise too that beggars can’t be choosers.
Church pews are also the setting for the film’s prologue. During a service, the child Judith, sitting with her Aunt D’Arcy (Wendy Hiller), gets hiccups and, as a result, the giggles – two little girls in the pew in front are laughing too. Judith’s stony-faced aunt crossly tells her niece to control herself and grasps her hand almost violently. It’s an effective scene although the literal squeezing out of the laughter is obviously symbolic: Clayton fades out the child’s face and into the worried, joyless countenance of Maggie Smith’s Judy, decades later, in the back of a taxi, approaching Mrs Rice’s boarding house. (The child’s hiccups prefigure, with comic imagination, the older woman’s drinking habits.) Once arrived at Mrs Rice’s, Judy unpacks a photograph of Aunt D’Arcy and a painting of Christ: finding a place for both in her room is a priority. The aunt raised Judy, whose parents died when she was a young child. Judy continued to live with her and, when Aunt D’Arcy became ill, cared for her. Judy regularly talks to her late aunt and prays to the subject of her other treasured portrait. A flashback to her life with the geriatric Aunt D’Arcy encapsulates very effectively the fractious antagonism between them, and their mutual dependency.
It was interesting to see The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne for the first time a couple of days after a second viewing of another melancholy Dublin story of isolation, Albert Nobbs. Watching the latter again, I was never convinced that Glenn Close’s Albert had been living her secret life for many years: her gestures and mannerisms seem part of a disguise that she’s trying out. Maggie Smith, however, is extraordinarily good at suggesting how ingrained are Judy’s habits and idiosyncrasies. This is one of her finest performances: Smith doesn’t work either her natural eccentricity or her flair for exaggerating eccentricity. She plays straight and, since her Judy Hearne is an oddball nevertheless, the effect is moving. Judy’s and James Madden’s hopes of each other are, of course, disappointed. As this process occurs and Judy’s self-control continues to decline, she finds her religious faith disintegrating too. She appeals first to a priest (Alan Quigley) and then to God himself, in both cases unavailingly. Maggie Smith’s portrait is, for the most part, wonderfully delicate. This gives a shocking contrasting power to the violence of Judy’s crying alone in her room when she learns from Mrs Rice the truth of who Madden is and what he’s after; and, later, to her furious outburst against God (‘I hate you!’) and desecration of a church altar.
The smaller roles of other lodgers in the boarding house, a bow-tied bore (Niall Buggy) and an hysterically intolerant schoolteacher (Sheila Reid), are thin and overplayed but the landlady herself is startling. With a viciously insincere smile almost always on her face, Mrs Rice (Marie Kean) is nasty almost for the sake of being nasty. So too, and more exuberantly, is her wastrel son, Bernie (Ian McNeice), a mother’s boy with the looks of an obese, perverted cherub. Ian McNeice’s unabashed willingness to be repulsive – physically as well as morally – is impressive. As James Madden, Bob Hoskins sometimes gives the impression of struggling to sustain the American accent and persona but perhaps this is part of his characterisation: putting on a front is an important part of Madden’s personality. Hoskins is, in any case, very good at registering, economically but incisively, Madden’s changes of mood. He has a fine bit when Madden returns for a second time to Dublin and visits Judy in the nursing home where she goes to recover after the breakdown that climaxes in her blasphemous tirade. Madden, who needs funds more than ever, has got the wrong end of the stick again about Judy’s financial state of health, He’s found out from Bernie Rice that, after she left the boarding house, Judy stayed at a swanky hotel. Madden doesn’t realise that she spent all her remaining savings in order to do so. Judy is understandably angered by his stupid efforts to get money from her a second time: Bob Hoskins plays beautifully Madden’s chastened, clueless attempts, in response to her anger, to offer Judy his friendship anyway. Rudi Davies does well as the maid at the boarding house who’s on the receiving end of sex from both Madden and Bernie Rice.
Before her collapse, Judy, every Sunday after mass, visits Moira O’Neill (Prunella Scales), an old classmate from school, and her university professor husband (Kevin Flood). Judy’s arrival at the O’Neills’ is invariably announced by her joking ‘It’s only me’ at the doorway to the drawing room. The couple’s three children, if they don’t escape elsewhere when Judy comes, laugh more or less openly at her looks and locutions; even Moira and her husband occasionally find it hard to conceal their amusement. The O’Neills are, nevertheless, friends enough to pay for Judy’s private room in the nursing home. Moira visits her there and sits knitting to keep herself busy. As she’s about to leave, Judy thanks her for her kindness and says, in an almost puzzled tone, ‘You know, Moira, I never liked you’. This moment of candour has great impact: it’s shocking to Moira and contrasts tellingly with Judy’s manner – or manners – when she visited the O’Neill home and was being made fun of. She gave no hint then of what she really felt, understanding that she was in no position to do so. (‘It’s only me …’) Before her own stay in the home, Judy goes there to visit another friend from her youth and disgraces herself by producing a bottle of gin which she and her friend Edie (Aine Ni Mhuiri) share. The nuns who run the place are predictably outraged. Once Judy’s a patient, they become attentive and, eventually and less predictably, kind to her.
In spite of these excellent moments in the nursing home episode, the last part of Judith Hearne seems rushed and almost careless. Judy is driven away from the home to start a new chapter in her life, which you assume will mean another rented room and renewed attempts to earn a living through piano teaching. It’s not clear how she’ll cope financially in the short term – perhaps the O’Neills are continuing to help her. Jack Clayton may mean to suggest that Judy is somehow now free of illusions – but does that mean free of alcohol dependency as well as naive religiosity? The evasion of the question makes the final note of hopefulness, mild as it is, feel phony. Clayton tends to overuse Georges Delerue’s sensitive score at both ends of the film: doing so in its final moments increases one’s sense that the director is straining for a more positive conclusion than the story allows.
9 January 2015