Dancing at Lughnasa

Meryl Streep was one of the stars selected in August 2024 for TCM's Summer Under the Stars. One of her movies that I hadn't heard of before, probably because it was a little film made on location in Ireland, was Dancing at Lughnasa. Since it sounded interesting enough, I decided to record it and watch it to be able to do a post on it here.

The movie opens up telling us the scenes we're watching are set in the summer of 1936. However, the little boy flying a kite at the beginning, young Michael Mundy, is all grown up now and giving us some narration at various points in the movie, with a coda at the end telling us what happens to many of the main characters. Michael lives in a village called Ballyegg in a rural part of County Donegal in Ireland (the county due west of what is now Northern Ireland, although the movie was apparently filmed in a different part of Ireland) with his mother Christina, and his four aunts. Christina never got married, and that's something that's obviously a bit of a scandal in rural 1930s Ireland where the Catholic Church still held a great deal of sway.

The family ekes out a living from subsitence farming, with income supplemented by Kate (that's Meryl Streep) being the one sister to have a permanent job, as a teacher at the local primary school. However, attendance at the school has been falling as more families move to larger towns, so her job at the school may be under threat. Christina and sister Maggie don't seem to have any real work at all beyond tending the farm, while the other two sisters, Rose and Agnes, earn a small amount of money by doing custom piecework knitting. Those knitting jobs, like Kate's teaching job, may be under threat as there are rumors that a textile factory is going to open up in a nearby town. Nice if you can get a job, but people in the middle of nowhere? Good luck. Complicating things is that Agnes clearly has some sort of developmental disability and thinks that married Danny, who lives across the lake, is as in love with her as she is with him.

If that's not complicated enough for the family, the return of two people makes things even more of a mess for the family. One is eldest brother Jack (Michael Gambon). He went off a good quarter century ago, when Ireland was still wholly a part of the UK, to serve as Fr. Jack, a chaplain to the Catholics in the British armed forces, and stayed away from Ireland to work at a leper colony in what is now Uganda. He's returning home in part because he has what seems to be dementia, but in part because the Church hierarchy seem to think he's losing his faith and taking up the native African religious beliefs. Not a good idea for a Catholic missionary. Then there's Michael's dreamer father Gerry (Rhys Ifans), who left Ireland looking for adventure, and is now showing up possibly to say goodbye one last time as he's thinking of going off to Spain to join the International Brigades that fought against the Francoist forces in the Spanish Civil War.

Dancing at Lughnasa is more of a slice of life movie than one with a fully fleshed-out plot, as it's based on a play and the end of the movie before the coda really leaves a lot of questions badly answered. The location shooting is lovely, and the acting is mostly good, although for me Dancing at Lughnasa falls a bit in the screenplay and storytelling. In addition to what I felt were plot holes, this is another of those stories where it feels like the writer (Irish playwright Brian Friel) is trying to make everybody a bit too quirky for their own good. Still, despite the fact that Dancing at Lughnasa has some flaws, it's one that I think has more positives than negatives.