The Long Day Closes

One of the greatest movie musicals ever made. One of the greatest movies about the experience of childhood ever made. One of the greatest autobiographical movies ever made. One of the greatest memory movies ever made. One of the greatest movies ever made by a director who happens to be gay. One of the greatest movie documents about growing up gay ever made. And when all of these come together in one movie, it is, for me, simply one of the greatest movies ever made. On my list of 6, the least important are the last two. The points made are of interest to those who care about such things, but one’s appreciation of the worth of the film does not depend on them.Performances throughout are superb, down to the smallest role. Leigh McCormack gives one of the greatest performance I have ever seen by a young actor, rivaled perhaps only by Christian Bale in Empire of the Son and Hunter McCracken in The Tree of Life. According to IMDB, he has never been in another film. According to director Terence Davies, McCormack wanted to grow up and become a fireman. As Bud in this film, he is the central character and stand-in for the director as a young boy. Marjorie Yates plays his mother in the other central performance. Although she has made few movies, she seems to have been in lots of British television series over the years. (Only in this last viewing did I note that someone in passing and barely audibly addresses her as Mrs. Davies.)Yesterday I watched the new Criterion Blu-ray edition of the film. It looks absolutely gorgeous. I had suspected that it was, even from the washed-out tapes and imperfect DVD I had seen over the years. The colors of the film are blues, grays, blacks, and browns along with dull yellows. Oddly beautiful. Occasionally there is a startling splash of color: a vivid green door, a bar of red soap. Red brick walls covered with black soot, with only a bit of the red showing through.Davies and others in the interviews and commentaries stress that this is a “true” story. It is his family, the house where he lived, the street outside, the school, the church (which is the exact same one attended by Davies as a child). The house and street having been destroyed some years ago with no photographs of it, the recreation was based on detailed discussions Davies had with his production designer. It all looks totally “real.” It is not. There are conscious slight exaggerations, and both Davies and his production designer comment on to what and why. However, among other things (see above), the movie is a brilliant depiction of what daily life was like in a poor household in Liverpool in the 1960s.I could carry on at great length about the use of extant music in the film, but part of the great pleasure is encountering songs and being surprised by them and how they are used. Sometimes they are used in their original form. Sometimes the mother may be singing a popular song of the time while she is going about her daily affairs (many of the songs used were favorites of the director’s mother). Sometimes groups are singing songs at neighborhood parties. Sometimes it is just the music in young Bud’s head. This may suggest to you both the British television and the Hollywood musical versions of Pennies from Heaven as well as other of Dennis Potter’s works. Yes. But I think the use of songs here surpasses even what Potter did. Sit back and relax and let them wash over you. Let the whole experience of this film wash over you.The plot? Well, what plot? I guess what plot there is depends on whether you are viewing the work as the story of a boy over several years or as the story of one day in his life in which he remembers. If it is the former, it is about a boy moving into a new school and being bullied and made generally unhappy. If the latter, it is about a boy wanting money to go to the movies, getting it, and discovering that the friend he wanted to go with has gone off with another boy, making Bud most unhappy. I think it is both timeframes welded into one. I’ll always remember Dr. Egbert Sydnor Ownbey (yep, that’s his real name) who taught me Shakespeare in college talking about the two time sequences in Othello. One major aspect of the story makes sense only if the action of the play takes place in a brief span of time. Another main thread makes sense only if it is spread out over several weeks or even months. He thought the great genius of Shakespeare was to balance these different time frames so admirably that it matters not to the viewer or reader. I think Davies does something like that with this film. Ray Bradbury once wrote a short story called “All Summer in a Day.” I think he would have liked this movie.Certainly the film is about erosion of the human spirit. When you see the film, you will understand this clearly because of the way the writer/director underscores it with a classroom lecture. And pay attention to the voiceover in the last sequence in the coal cellar. You see it throughout, the bullying.by peers and authority figures, and the little unkindnesses barely noticeable to those doing them. On this viewing I begin to understand that at least some part of that erosion is perhaps natural. Like wind. Water. And, of course, the mere (!) passage of time on our souls. But I will stick to my guns that the movie is about reclamation as well. Reclaiming the past by dealing with it. And in this case, the reclamation has resulted in the creation of a great work of art. Thank you, Terence Davies.

This is a gorgeous film. It is about the "tween" gay experience--that time when awareness of ones sexuality occurs, but one is too young to really do anything about it. The fact that the boy is gay is established early in the film as he looks out a window noticing a particularly attractive and shirtless worker who winks at him. That's the end of any indication of the boy's homosexuality, except for how he relates and sees the rest of the world. He is obsessed with the movies and sees his hometown world in poetic terms. The film is about the boy's observations of everything from family to school to the influence of Hollywood. For some it may be long and it is light on story and there are no plot points leading from one to the other and culminating in some sort of satisfying end or message. It is just an exploration of a boy's experience in the world when that lens is colored by being gay. The DVD extras showing the creation of the film are very informative and add to the appreciation of this piece of art.

Many British cultural critics consider Terence Davies likely their greatest living director, and much of that estimation rests on this, his loveliest film. An excursion into memory, THE LONG DAY CLOSES may evoke Fellini (in its visions of the past rendered larger than life, as in the famous ship sequence in AMARCORD) and Dennis Potter (in its use of popular music not just to romanticize the past but to show its inevitable dissonances with its realities) while all the time seeming very much its own special and distinct creation. The tableaux Davies evokes--from its opening shot of a poor Liverpool residential street drenched in a downpour, to its great closing shot of a mottled evening sky--almost stop the heart with their beauty. The story is a patchwork of memories of the childhood of Davies himself, here called "Bud": the youngest by far of four children, the film documents a year of his life (at age eleven) that roughly covers 1955 to 1956. No great dramatic incidents occur in the story: no one take seriously ill, or runs away, or gets married, or even fights. The film is in an assemblage of "spots of memory" wherein Bud usually stays at the margins (he is usually seen poised on a staircase or in a window), watching or listening to his family and the people around him. Although adored by his mother and elder siblings he is always an outsider; newly aware of his budding attraction to men, he can't join in in his brothers' attractions to the opposite sex (their fiancees are in the house nearly as much as the children themselves), and stays forever aloof. Family socializing is a wondrous time for Bud, although he is almost always the only youngster included. The only time he sees his age peers are at school, which is presented as a noisy painful place governed by adults who despise children. His great sources of solace are in the Catholic church, where he is a devout practitioner of his mother's Catholic faith, in the local movie palaces (of which he is an equally devout follower), and the radio: Davies uses the popular music of the time--Nat King Cole and Doris Day--not simply to enhance the beauty of Bud's surroundings but also to create a thread of mass culture to unite the ages and genders of Bud's community.The film could be a little much, especially in its treatment of Bud's loneliness: there are times when he veers dangerously close to Matt Lucas's "the only gay boy in the village" in his constant self-pity and sorrow. But the highly personal and subjective nature of the film renders all this allowable. Davies is so sure in his decisions and his tone that his romanticization of the past is ultimately proudly affirmed; what is more, he also even deftly deconstructs it as the film proceeds. Criterion's reissue of this film (with great sound and image restoration, and lovely extras) could not be more welcome.

The director describes the inner life of a young boy with a series of poignant and moving images that often get lost as we grow older. The family is beautifully drawn, and yet it is as though we are watching ghosts filtered through the young boy's dream-like existence. There is a beautiful scene, very short, where the boy looks from the house window and sees his brother, stripped to the waist, building a wall. Through brilliant direction and acting we know that the boy is filled with love and admiration for his brother, admiration for him as a beautiful man and love for him as his brother, as well as an almost primitive knowledge that things pass, that this moment will be gone. In the heightened, emotional life of the child where everything is highly significant, there is a poignant gap between the strange adult world and this precious small moment.In a way this film describes how the limited view of the child, confined by the street, school, his friend, makes a whole universe in itself that is larger than the world of the adults around him, despite their mystique, their perceived freedom. At the end of the film the boy and his friend see themselves as part of the mysteries of the universe. They can make the natural leap from the small tragedies of their childhood world and the warm confines of a bustling working class household to the stars and planets that an inspired teacher has introduced them to. They can make that link. A masterpiece.

Through the use of music,soundtracks of films,minimal dialogue,imaginative lighting and camerawork,the director Terence Davies recreates the lost world of his childhood in 1950s Liverpool. The film is nostalgic but never sentimental and Davies has the marvelous gift of making the mundane poetic.Quite simply a masterpiece and a film that deserves to be better known. It should be in anybodies 100 best films of all time: it's certainly in mine.

Through the use of music,soundtracks of films,minimal dialogue,imaginative lighting and camerawork,the director Terence Davies recreates the lost world of his childhood in 1950s Liverpool. The film is nostalgic but never sentimental and Davies has the marvelous gift of making the mundane poetic.Quite simply a masterpiece and a film that deserves to be better known. It should be in anybodys 100 best films of all time: it's certainly in mine.

Favourite film of mine, reminding me of my schooldays.

This is Terence Davies' follow up to Distant Voices, Still Lives. The film explores similar territory and set in Liverpool in the 1950s is a meditation on childhood and a time that can never be recaptured. Fantastic images, cinematography and evocative use of popular and classical music add to this wonderful mix.