The Parting Glass
Stephen Moyer (2018)
In The Parting Glass, which takes its title from the traditional Irish song of the same name, five members of a Missouri family meet up to collect the belongings and prepare for the funeral of a sixth member. The five are elderly paterfamilias Tommy (Edward Asner), his son Dan (Denis O’Hare) and daughters Ally (Melissa Leo) and Mare (Cynthia Nixon), and their brother-in-law Karl (Rhys Ifans). The dead woman is Colleen (Anna Paquin, seen in flashbacks), Tommy’s third daughter and Karl’s wife. Stephen Moyer has previously directed a few episodes of the hit television series True Blood, in which he also starred, but this is his debut feature behind the camera. The Parting Glass is Denis O’Hare’s first writing credit on IMDB. Both director and the writer, in other words, are known primarily as actors. It shows in several ways.
Moyer mostly shoots his cast in close-ups that give the impression of a player admiring other players. He tends to cut from one face to another according to whose turn it is to act or react most conspicuously – so that the characters seldom appear in visually interesting relation to one another. There are occasional emotionally powerful moments; more usually, Moyer and his cinematographer Guy Godfree capture actors in the process of constructing their performances, at what sometimes looks like an early stage (perhaps only to be expected: the film was shot in just three weeks). In spite of increasingly predictable switches from laughter to tears and back, there’s not much depth to most of the acting, though Edward Asner, now in his late eighties, is sometimes an honourable exception. So is Anna Paquin: a role that separates her from the group turns out to be an advantage but Moyer also photographs Paquin (his wife) more imaginatively than he does the others. Until late on, Colleen, in her family’s memories, is glimpsed rather than presented in full face to camera.
O’Hare’s influence on the film is stronger than Moyer’s and more problematic than the latter’s directing inexperience (though the influence may well be magnified as a consequence of the inexperience). The Parting Glass carries a dedication to the writer’s sister, who took her own life in 2010. O’Hare is a good actor but here, no doubt out of respect for his late sister, he puts a definite histrionic distance between the feelings he has about her death and the feelings he’s prepared to express on screen. It’s not surprising, in the circumstances, that others in the cast, sensitive to what the material means to one of their number, take their cue from him.
The screenplay also has some weaknesses familiar in autobiographical material. First, the author’s alter ego is more clearly defined than the other characters. Dan, like his creator, is a gay actor, who has travelled from his home in New York to rejoin the family in Missouri. In the present, he makes phone calls to his partner back in the big city; in flashback, Colleen hears him for apposite lines from Uncle Vanya (‘We used to think of you as superhuman but now the scales have fallen from my eyes and I see you as you are!’). We get relatively little idea about the working or domestic lives of Dan’s siblings. Second, and more crucially, the writer assumes that, because the events he’s dramatising really happened and were important to him, his script is bound to convey that personal experience. In an interview with Variety, in response to the question ‘What was it about this story primarily that you wanted to put out there?’, Denis O’Hare replied:
‘I think suicide is one of our last taboos. It leaves behind a fog of blame and what-ifs in a way that any other sort of death doesn’t. One is rarely at peace with a suicide and I wanted to show that.’
The Parting Glass isn’t specifically enough about the aftermath of a suicide and O’Hare’s script fails to convey much sense that it’s illustrating the taboo that he mentions, with the family unable to face up to the implications of what Colleen has done. She might as well have died in an accident or from natural causes.
Although this isn’t much of a film, attending its world premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival was a great pleasure. The introduction by the Festival’s artistic director Mark Adams was a model of affable concision. Adams handed on to Stephen Moyer, who talked about The Parting Glass with passion and charm, and recorded evidently genuine thanks to all and sundry, including the EIFF technicians who’d worked through the previous night to rectify a major problem with the sound quality on the copy of the film to be shown. For a while, the voices seemed too ‘thick’ – an issue of clarity, not volume – but perhaps only because we’d been alerted to the difficulties Moyer mentioned. He and Mark Adams built up so much goodwill beforehand that, in spite of all its weaknesses, I liked The Parting Glass.
24 June 2018