Jim Sheridan (1990)
Jim Sheridan made this between My Left Foot (1989) and In the Name of the Father (1993). Like those two other films, The Field yielded an Academy Award nomination for its leading man; unlike them, it was a commercial and critical failure. Coming to The Field for the first time many years later, I was hoping to discover an undeservedly neglected piece that stood comparison with My Left Foot and In the Name of the Father. Not so, I’m afraid: it was Richard Harris’s Oscar nomination that was undeserved. Against the opening titles, two men make their way, with effort, up a cliff path. They’re carrying something in a cart and, when they reach the cliff-top, throw their cargo into the sea. Even at this early stage, Harris, as the farmer ‘Bull’ McCabe, and Sean Bean, as his son Tadhg, are doing plenty of acting in the meaningful looks department. There’s an awful lot more of this to come.
The men have dropped a dead donkey, killed by Tadhg after it trespassed into the large field that the McCabes have rented for generations – and transformed, from its original barren state into land fertile enough to raise the cows and sheep that provide the family’s livelihood. Ten years after her husband’s death, the field’s owner (Frances Tomelty) now decides to sell the field – but at public auction rather than direct to Bull. The film is the tragic story of the consequences of Bull’s determination to acquire the field at any price. It goes almost without saying there’s a tragic backstory too. Bull and his wife Maggie (Brenda Fricker) haven’t spoken for eighteen years – not since the death of their elder son Seamie, for which Bull blames himself. At the remarkably young age of thirteen, Seamie took his own life because his father told him the field could support only one family and that Tadhg, as the younger brother, would therefore have to emigrate when he grew up.
The source material is a stage play by John B Keane, first staged at Dublin’s Olympia Theatre in 1965. (Ray McAnally was Bull McCabe in the original stage production and Sheridan’s original choice for the film role too. McAnally died suddenly in 1989, shortly after completing My Left Foot, in which he played Christy Brown’s father.) The Field is set in the 1930s in Carraigthomond, a coastal rural village in south-west Ireland – and in classic (if that’s the word) territory for Irish rural melodrama. This is a place, presided over by a morally harsh but heartless Catholic Church, where people struggle to make a living on soil stained with the blood of their ancestors. There’s debate in the film about different kinds of law – common law versus the ‘law of the land’ – but no sign of professional law enforcement when it’s needed). An American (Tom Berenger), representing technological progress, arrives on the scene to contest Bull’s bid for the field. The Yank (as he’s mostly called – though it seems his name is Peter) has forebears from the area but means to build a hydro-electric plant and quarry stone for new roads. The first auction is suspended when the widow, while the bidding is going on, intervenes to demand a reserve price on the field above what’s been offered. On the eve of the rescheduled auction, Bull and Tadhg confront their American rival. When Tadhg comes off worse in a fight with him, Bull turns on both younger men and kills the Yank. At the next day’s auction, Bull’s bid for the field – made on his behalf by his eccentric acquaintance-cum-whipping-boy ‘Bird’ O’Donnell (John Hurt) – is uncontested.
The film now launches into threefold overdrive. Maggie McCabe breaks her long silence in order to deliver home truths to her husband. Tadhg, whose meaningful looks have been directed increasingly towards Katie (Jenny Conroy), the daughter of a despised family of travellers, lies to her that he killed the American: this impresses Katie enough to sleep with Tadhg and they make plans to run away together. The local priest (Sean McGarvey) expels his congregation from the church, condemning their collective silence and complicit responsibility for the death of the American. Since the latter’s corpse has not yet been dredged from its watery grave (the body is discovered at the same time as that of the dead donkey), the priest’s judgment seems, as well as severe, premature. If all the parishioners know that Bull is responsible, it seems surprising that the priest hasn’t also concluded this and reported his suspicions – except that, of course, there’s no one to report them to.
The plot synopsis of The Field on Wikipedia, in its summary of the closing stages, is perhaps more telling than it means to be. The succession of phrases in (my) italics in the extract below gives a flavour of the melodramatic pitch of the climax. When he realises he’s killed Peter:
‘[Bull] McCabe has a mental break [sic]. He confuses Peter with his dead son Seamie. … Tadhg comes home to tell his father he is leaving with the Traveller’s daughter and says he never wanted the field. The Parish priest arrives to confront McCabe about the discovery of Peter. Having lost his son and with the corpse discovered, McCabe goes insane and herds his cattle to the cliffs. Bird informs Tadhg that his father has gone mad. Tadhg rushes to stop his father but gets driven over the cliff by the herd of cattle and killed. Further maddened with grief, McCabe attempts to drive the waves back from his dead son, while Tadhg’s mother and the Traveller’s daughter sob on the clifftop.
I guess it’s possible that The Field (I’m assuming Sheridan has been faithful to the original) could be effective on stage if given a non-realistic production. On screen, however, the combination of expressive landscape and weather (it’s nearly always raining), relentless declamations and repeated bursts of physical violence comes across as more than tautologous. Only a few months ago, I found myself wondering if the problems with Sheridan’s most recent film, The Secret Scripture, derived from his attempt to give naturalistic treatment to source material that just wasn’t susceptible to this. It seems he had previous form in doing this.
Sad to say, The Field is increasingly ridiculous and Elmer Bernstein’s Hollywoodising score doesn’t make it less so. Jim Sheridan has often proved himself a fine writer of dialogue but plenty of what’s said here comes over as verging on a spoof. ‘For all the wars we’ve fought in Carraigthomond, we’ve never laid a hand on a woman’ (a likely story); ‘I dug the rocks out [of the field] with my bare hands’; ‘You’ve been living with a dead boy for eighteen years’ – the first two of those gems are Bull’s and the last one Maggie’s. Not all the comical lines are so purple. Here’s an exchange between Tadhg and Katie:
Tadhg: I fought the Yank.
Katie: You fought the Yank?
Tadhg: I killed him.
Katie: You killed him? [Pause] You killed the Yank? [Tadhg nods.] I never thought you had it in you.
You want Tadhg to reply, ‘Well, I do – so how about a fuck?’, but it seems this (which is what happens) goes without saying.
If only more went without saying in The Field. If this were a silent movie, Richard Harris might have deserved an Oscar: his face is an extraordinary camera subject but, in a self-conscious role-of-a-lifetime turn, he goes at Bull’s many speeches too hungrily. There’s even a rare disappointing performance from John Hurt, whose Bird O’Donnell (bad teeth, cackling laughter) calls to mind the John Mills village idiot in Ryan’s Daughter except that Bird, unfortunately, has the power of speech. It says a lot about this film that Brenda Fricker is eloquent until Maggie opens her mouth. The most remarkable images are those of the donkey underwater and, in the finale, of the cattle that propel Tadhg to his death before themselves falling through the air from the cliff-top. These animals, at least, are not overacting.
21 January 2018
