Terence Davies (1995)
All Terence Davies’ film work before this – three shorts and two features – was set in Liverpool. The Neon Bible was the first of what would eventually be three films that he made with American subjects and locations (The House of Mirth (2000) and A Quiet Passion (2016) followed). The Neon Bible is also a Davies first in that his screenplay is an adaptation. The source material is a novel of the same name, by John Kennedy Toole (written when the author was sixteen, not published until 1989, twenty years after Toole’s suicide at the age of thirty-one). Even so, Georgia in The Neon Bible seems home from home for Davies, shows him redefining himself in transatlantic terms. The story is set in the 1940s, the decade of his birth. The protagonist is, like Davies, a sensitive boy with an abusive father and an adored mother. Harsh Christian dogma, stirring church music, secular music-making within the community, the nearly constant presence of voices and songs on the radio – these are integral to the culture of the small town where The Neon Bible takes place, as they were to Davies’ accounts of working-class life in 1940s and 1950s Liverpool.
In all these respects, then, the new land is well-trodden Davies territory. The director’s signature is unmistakable, too (at least for someone coming – like me – to The Neon Bible for the first time with most of Davies’ future films under their belt). The meticulous composition of mostly inert images. A prevailing dramatic languor, except when either characters are singing or things turn suddenly melodramatic. The film opens with images of a train, and one of its few passengers – fifteen-year-old David (Jacob Tierney). His face tells us that David is deep in melancholy thought. His thoughts trigger flashbacks to the childhood that he’s now leaving behind. He recalls how his father, Frank (Denis Leary), lost his factory job, became a wife-beater, went to fight in Italy during World War II, and was killed in action there. David remembers how his mother, Sarah (Diana Scarwid), though brutally treated by her husband, went crazy with grief after Frank’s death; and recalls, with more pleasure, his Aunt Mae (Gena Rowlands), a former nightclub singer, who came to live with the family when David was some years younger (Drake Bell plays him as a ten-year-old). Once Aunt Mae departs to start a new life in Nashville, where she hopes to revive her singing career, David is left to care for his mentally and physically deteriorating mother. The powers-that-be deem him too young to do so; a preacher (Peter McRobbie) arrives at the family home, intending to commit Sarah to an asylum, unaware that she has just died. Rather than enlightening him, David uses his father’s old rifle to shoot the preacher dead. He then buries his mother before taking the train out of town, into the future.
There are some good things in The Neon Bible, chiefly Gena Rowlands. Getting her was a real casting coup for a British filmmaker working in the US for the first time. Rowlands’ vivid, blatant, free-spirited Aunt Mae gives the film nearly all its energy – not only when she’s singing but also when, for example, Mae reads through a few old press cuttings. She basks in the warmth of one review before being ruefully reminded that it gave the dress that she wore more praise than it gave her singing. Even Gena Rowlands, though, can’t always avoid giving the impression that she’s only obeying director’s orders – a quality that also detracts from Diana Scarwid’s skilful description of Sarah’s breakdown, and which paralyses Jacob Tierney’s conscientious performance in the lead. The cinematographer, Michael Coulter, creates some fine pictures, but it’s no coincidence that these were praised by some critics in art-history terms. A typical instance of Davies image-making: a white sheet on a washing line expands to fill the screen, then dissolves into the Stars and Stripes (also seen draping the coffins of soldiers like Frank). This takes so long that the sequence becomes, for the viewer, nothing more or less than watching the process of the dissolve being achieved. As for the shots of David on the train, these are beguiling at first, but repeated ad nauseam. To be fair to Davies, he is on record as admitting to Time Out that the film ‘doesn’t work and that’s entirely my fault’. At the time of its release, though, he was also quoted in Sight and Sound as saying, ‘I didn’t want to dramatise the book …’ In that aim, Terence Davies succeeded.
16 November 2025
