A
film review by Roger Ebert on December 20, 1970.
The
very first shot of David Lean's Ryan's Daughter shows us a tiny speck of
a figure running along the ridge of an enormous cliff. Alas, this shot
introduces the tone of the film all too well; Lean's characters, well-written
and well-acted, are finally dwarfed by his excessive scale.
Not
every subject is suited to the epic treatment, to the vast landscapes and
towering clouds and portentous musical scores, of the recent Lean style. Dr. Zhivago could support it because the
Russian revolution was appropriate to the heroic scale. But a simple little
love triangle on the Southwest coast of Ireland simply can't bear the weight of
Lean's overachieving.
The
distance between the subject and the style eventually proves fatal to Ryan's Daughter. That, and a puzzling
inability on Lean's part to keep his symbols under control.
The
night after Rose Ryan and the handsome young officer first meet, for example,
we get a shot of the officer's stallion neighing and the girl's mare perking up
its ears. This sort of failure of tone is inexcusable and alerts us to worse
lapses later on. When the young couple makes love for the first time, we're
hardly surprised when Lean shows the seeds blowing off a dandelion pod and
landing, you guessed it, in a lake.
Ryan's Daughter is an original
screenplay by Robert Bolt, who also
did Lean's Dr. Zhivago and Lawrence of
Arabia. With those two successes behind them, I wonder if Lean and Bolt
weren't simply trying to duplicate the formula instead of trying something new.
Dr. Zhivago in particular was the
story of a doomed love affair, played out against vast historical events. Ryan's Daughter is a modest retread.
But
with all due respect for the Irish, who knew how to stage a revolution with
style, the IRA uprising was not quite on the scale of the Russian revolution,
and Omar Sharif and Julie Christie, writ large against the steppes, overshadow
a naive little publican's daughter and a quiet school teacher. The problem with
Ryan's daughter Rose isn't that her epic love has been caught up in the tides
of history, but that she has hot pants.
Her
lover, if an early hint is to be believed, doesn't even bother to tell her he's
already married. Her husband patiently waits for them to bum it out. The whole affair becomes pretty tawdry, and so when
Lean pulls his camera back two miles and puts on the 1,000 mm lens, and the
music swells heroically, and the heavens and earth seem to confer godlike
stature on the couple, we can't buy it.
While
you're watching Ryan's Daughter,
memories of The Informer, Odd Man Out and The Quiet Man keep stirring. We remember from those films, and from
what else we know about the Irish, that they're nothing like the carefully
choreographed mobs of the Lean film. They're a dour and cynical race sometimes,
but they smile on occasion and they're not all shrews and traitors.
Yet,
in the Lean film the function of the village population is to run on cue to
whatever's happening. The people of the village all throng into the street, or
they all race to the beach, or they all go inside and slam their doors, or they
all go to persecute Rose, all at once. Nobody in the movie except the stars
goes anywhere by himself. Maybe the villagers are supposed to be a Greek
chorus. I don’t know. The effect wearies you after a while, anyway.
Besides,
there's already a Greek chorus in the film, in the form of John Mills. He plays a deformed village idiot, whose function is to
miraculously eavesdrop on every supposedly private moment in the film. He then
counterpoints the heroic characters on a comic scale, mocking the young officer
and following him around. He is also the instrument for the betrayal of the
adulterous affair, and he is the indirect cause of the officer's death. Just as
well. If there weren't somebody to spill the beans, you have the feeling no one
in the movie would catch on.
Against
all of these failures, which I think must largely be charged to Lean, Ryan's Daughter persists in giving us
several scenes that work. There is an absolutely stunning storm sequence, for
example, where quite authentic waves and winds pound against men who tie ropes
around their waists and go into the surf after weapons for the IRA, dropped off
by a German trawler. By its very success, this scene demonstrates what's wrong
with the tone of most of the movie. The actions of the characters and the scale
of the scene suit each other; there's a reason for the men to be there, risking
their lives. But Lean insists on the spectacular even in his trivial scenes.
The
performances largely survive the film's visual overkill. Robert Mitchum is splendid as the schoolteacher, and you realize once
again what a fine actor he is. He's the only American in the cast, and yet
paradoxically he seems the most Irish. Trevor
Howard gives a bravura performance as Father Hugh, and the two of them have
a gem of a scene on the beach, one in his cassock, the other in his nightshirt.
Sarah Miles plays Rose very
well, and yet her accurate interpretation of the role helps once again to
betray Lean's excesses. Rose is essentially a simple, inexperienced girl who
has very dangerously confused sex and love. The more we see of her naiveté, the
more we can't accept her great love as being made on Olympus. That's also made
difficult by Christopher Jones'
performance as the British officer. An actor could hardly express less
without playing a corpse. You figure she must want him for his body; he never
says a single tender, or beautiful, or revealing thing to her. All he wants to
know is when he can see her next.
I
have a friend who says a new David Lean movie is like a new Picasso. It may not
be a great Picasso, he says, but by God it's a Picasso and worth seeing for
that reason if for no other. I suppose that's true of Lean and all great
directors: Their work is interesting just because they've signed it, and the
failures help to illuminate the successes.
Maybe
you should see Ryan's Daughter for
that reason. I imagine it will be around a long time and that it will find an
enormous audience of those hungry for True Romances on the epic scale. For the
rest of us, Ryan's Daughter remains a
disappointing failure of tone, a lush and overblown self-indulgence in which
David Lean has given us a great deal less than meets the eye. [Ebert’s rating:
** out of 4 stars]
Labels:
drama, romance
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