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Performers, Reviews, Screen, Take Another Look

Take Another Look: Maggie Smith is ‘Almost Too Good’ in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

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The second in a series of retrospective pop culture reviews examines the late actor’s overlooked triumph as an Irish spinster caught up in a crisis of faith…

WHEN A COMMUNION wafer gives genteel young Judith Hearne (Emma Jane Lavin) the hiccoughs and other girls in the congregation start giggling, a painful demonstration of Catholic self control is delivered by a pious aunt played by the formidable Wendy Hiller.

It’s the opening scene of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987), and young Judith’s stoic face fades to that of middle-aged Maggie Smith (1934-2024) as she’s delivered to the door of a devout 1950s Dublin boarding house. 

Now so down-at-heel that she ascends to her latest shoddy digs with the resignation of a martyr, the question of why nothing appears to have changed for Judith in the intervening decades is masterfully explored in the big-screen swan song of British director Jack Clayton (1921-1995) .

Yet despite Smith winning the BAFTA for Best Actress, the role of hapless part-time piano tutor Judith Hearne was commonly overlooked in her obituaries, basically because hardly anyone got a chance to see it.

After portraying a series of upright matrons in the 1980s (most successfully as Charlotte Bartlett in Merchant Ivory’s A Room With a View), Judith Hearne offered Smith another “prime” akin to the global attention she garnered as Jean Brodie.

Miss Hearne exhibits all Miss Brodie’s blind passion, but where the schoolteacher used bravado to stave off scandal in a conservative society, the piano teacher is shamed into silence; and this exquisite production from the Handmade Films’ stable was similarly humiliated at the box office.

There had been warning signs. The source material – Brian Moore’s 1955 debut novel – was banned in the Republic of Ireland as anti-religious, and notorious for its unsatisfactory ending. Director John Huston optioned the material in the 1960s but failed to mount a production, even with Katharine Hepburn onboard as Judith. During Clayton’s shoot, no Irish church would permit a location crew into their altar to recreate the protagonist’s crisis of faith.

PASSIONATE PAIR: Bob Hoskins and Maggie Smith

Yet this lapsed-Catholic director and his screenwriter Peter Nelson saw great potential in the story’s quite ordinary setting. We wince with Miss Hearne as she nervously pokes her way into the breakfast room, but we cringe when she’s instantly attracted to fellow boarder James Madden (Bob Hoskins, a dose of American vigour in austere postwar Dublin). 

Once Miss Hearne’s delusion takes hold – that Madden’s hints about a business partnership are a reciprocation of her romantic availability – we want to look away.

But we cannot, especially once deadly sins start to boil up. Madden’s sister, the landlady (played with deviously good manners by Marie Kean) and her corpulent dilettante son, Bernie (pitch-perfect Ian McNeice) conspire to ruin Judy’s dreams by exposing the penniless truth about James.

Achingly, he can’t help but see money in Miss Hearne’s heirloom jewels as she prays at mass; an occasion she construes as a first date ahead of a brand new life as a hotelier’s wife.

Augmented by Georges Delerue’s heartbreaking score and a supporting cast that includes Prunella Scales as Judith’s indifferent school friend, this powder keg burns inevitably towards the exposure of the heroine’s real passion, and the unforgivable expression of Madden’s lust.

All in the wrists

Caught up in a financial dispute between producer Handmade Films and distributor Cannon, Clayton’s passion project had a limited US release in late 1987 before being shelved. Despite awards attention for Smith and Hoskins in 1988, the film disappeared into the wallpaper, much like its heroine.

Reviews were polarised. Janet Maslin described Smith as “almost too good” in the role, because her subtlety only highlighted the production’s “obviousness”. Yet Pauline Kael called the film “a phenomenal piece” and recognised Smith’s pioneering task: “There has probably never been another movie in which a woman rejected the Church fathers’ ready-made answers.” 

Long known for the ‘wrist acting’ that she admitted in a 2018 documentary was appropriated from her longtime friend, actor Kenneth Williams, Smith puts her fine joints to expert use when charting Judith Hearne’s inescapable weakness – her alcoholism.

Like voyeurs, we get a glimpse of how far Judith is likely to fall when Smith has her impersonating Hedy Lamarr, all hips, elbows and chin as she poses sensually on her bed after returning from what she believes was her second date with Madden.

This is the comfortable comic schtick of Smith’s matrons, yet something else emerges once the booze flows and Judith’s religious conflict bursts like a shockwave.

Her wrists aimed upwards like a drowning woman, Miss Hearne appeals for help from a priest. But when it’s apparent that he’s as doubting as she is, Smith has Judith slam a suddenly powerful, un-bent forearm into the stone font as though daring the holy water to cleanse her lack of faith.

Unsatisfied, she aims both wrists at the tabernacle and attempts to claw her way into grace.

After taking her passion right up to her god, it’s arguable whether Miss Hearne ever reconciles her addiction within the patriarchy she so powerfully bucks. Wrists ultimately manacled by nothing more than dressing gown pockets in the convent asylum for her last ‘date’ with Madden, Maggie Smith appears to recognise Judith’s ultimate surrender as a feminist triumph of self forgiveness, just for today.

Witnessing her inhabit that discovery – when Moore, Nelson and Clayton all seemed to overlook it – Smith’s work here is much more that “almost too good”. It’s unmissable.

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is streaming on Amazon.

Reviews, Screen, Take Another Look

Take Another Look: Bruce Beresford’s ‘grandly messy’ Paradise Road

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First stop in a new series of retrospective pop culture reviews examines why Australia’s best female ensemble since Picnic at Hanging Rock disappeared almost without a trace…

IN THE OPENING scene of Bruce Beresford’s WWII epic Paradise Road (1997) the dignity of the Imperial Japanese Army is torn to shreds by privileged white plantation growers and their wives, chatting during a military ball at Singapore’s Raffles Hotel in February 1942. 

Adrienne Pargiter (Glenn Close) and Topsy Merritt (Julianna Margulies) throw in a few reminders about the effectiveness of the attack on Pearl Harbour, yet even as bombs start interrupting the dancing, Western denial on the imminent fall of Singapore remains dangerously intact.

It’s an apt metaphor for a film that tanked at the global box office after critics swooped, leaving stakeholders baffled about exactly where Paradise Road failed to deliver.

The ingredients for success were all in place. Beresford had a proven track record on war movies like Breaker Morant (1980) and award bait such as Driving Miss Daisy (1989). Producer Sue Milliken had global success with period piece Sirens (1994). 

ENSEMBLE EFFORT Frances McDormand (left) and Cate Blanchett

The Australian film industry’s strongest female ensemble since Picnic at Hanging Rock (1975) was headed up by multi Oscar-nominated Close and 1995’s best actress recipient for Fargo, Frances McDormand. Pauline Collins (Shirley Valentine), Margulies (ER), Jennifer Ehle (Pride and Prejudice), Elizabeth Spriggs (Sense and Sensibility) and a swag of established and emerging Australians (including Cate Blanchett in her feature debut) joined an international supporting cast working in four languages.

Production values were extremely high, particularly as a shipload of escaping women and children get scuttled by Japanese pilots and end up in a civilian internment camp in Sumatra. As they enter its barbed-wire gates, this band of socialites, plantation owners and nurses must cohabit with Dutch women, missionaries, nuns and Asians. Hard labour, starvation and brutal physical punishments await, as does the expectation to serve as “comfort women” for enemy officers.

After the hubris of Raffles, their dignity now lies in tatters.

But when Pargiter is overheard crooning a snippet of Elgar before lights out, British missionary Margaret Drummond (Collins, in a beautiful performance with her usual light touch) suggests a plan to raise morale with a vocal orchestra.

“It’s just humming,” complains the camp’s serial spoilsport and comic relief Mrs Tippler (Pamela Rabe), “anyone could do that.”

Which is the point. The pulsating, otherworldly voices make even the Japanese guards hold fire when ordered to break up the first performance of the fledgling ensemble, which requires no language to work its magic. 

Wasn’t dinkum

The real shame of the film’s failure to connect with a wide audience is that the Women’s Vocal Orchestra of Sumatra was real. Pargiter was based on Singapore-born chorale conductor Norah Chambers (1905-1989), and Drummond on British missionary and poet Margaret Dryburgh (1890-1945), both interns of the civilian camp at Palembang, Sumatra. Yet even Close wasn’t sure why Beresford chose to fictionalise these characters.  

Australian critics were lukewarm. There was a sense that the storyline, purported to be well-researched from intern diaries and interviews, just wasn’t dinkum, in part because of the atrocities it omitted.

International critics admired the “grandly messy” production but disliked the lack of narrative, pointing to the “predictable” aspects of the “sprawling” and “linear” story. 

CLOSE CONDUCTING Glenn Close (centre) as orchestra leader Adrien Pargiter

Yet revisiting it recently I finally discerned what’s at work in this deeply moving film. The key is in the conducting, not just Close’s determined and noble portrayal of orchestra leader Pargiter, but Beresford’s.

Unlike many of his contemporaries, he’s had a long career as a director of opera. Adapting the wealth of stories about real-life women caught up in war into a 120-minute screenplay required compressing facts into a grand lyrical narrative, in which the exotic setting feels operatic.

So war crimes are punctuated by hummed music and poetry, not big speeches; but when we get those, Close’s English accent is delivered almost as recitative. Emotional instrumental refrains run from Raffles right to the impenetrable jungle, where ever-increasing numbers of handmade crosses mark the lives cut cruelly short by war. Privileged women in reduced circumstances are like a chorus, with plenty of rueful pathos between the big arias, particularly in the hands of stalwarts Wendy Hughes and Penne Hackforth-Jones.

This is no Orange is the New Black (2013-2019), female-driven prisoner stories with 91 episodes to foreground the lives of every ensemble member; Paradise Road is high tragedy shaped by Beresford’s broad baton strokes.

In the release of death or liberation for the camp interns, he conducted a grace note that fell flat in the late 1990s, too close to real events to get away with anything but the complete truth. Watching it in an era that’s in need of all the grace we can get, the way this movie restores the dignity of sworn enemies with “just humming” is sublime.

Paradise Road is streaming on SBS On Demand, ABC iView, Apple TV and Amazon Prime.

Production stills by Jasin Boland.

Performers, Screen

No country for older women

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“The strategy behind the casting of younger women will take some explaining.”

IN February, Foxtel and Fremantle Media Australia announced the casting of an eagerly anticipated television adaptation of Picnic at Hanging Rock, Joan Lindsay’s 1967 Australian novel about a group of schoolgirls and their governess who go missing at a local rock formation on Valentine’s Day, 1900.

This fictional story was hauntingly filmed in 1975 by director Peter Weir, a production often credited with putting Australian movies back onto international screens after a decades-long hiatus.

CASTING COUP? Natalie Dormer

I stumbled on the casting announcement late and immediately sought reactions in the media about one quirk in the production that is currently filming: there are no older actresses in the series.

But nobody seems to have commented that the producers are taking considerable licence with Joan Lindsay’s characters.

Cast as the widowed, expatriate English headmistress of the young ladies’ college that is central to the story, Natalie Dormer plays Mrs Appleyard, described by Lindsay as sporting a: “…high-piled greying pompadour”.

AGE APPROPRIATE Rachel Roberts

The character was portrayed by British actor Rachel Roberts in Weir’s film, suitably coiffed and in her late forties at the time, whereas Dormer checks in at just 35.

Slightly more surreal is the casting of Australian actor Anna McGahan as mathematics mistress Greta McGraw, since McGahan is just 28, playing a character penned as having “coarse greying hair”.

Hair colour and texture would not specifically denote middle age had Lindsay not stated the teacher’s years at the time of the fateful picnic at 45. English-born Australian actor Vivean Gray took on the role for Peter Weir in her 50th year.

Australian actor Sibylla Budd has been cast in a role that was cut from the 1975 production, that of Miss Valange, mistress of art and literature.

Screen shot 2015-10-27 at 3.22.34 PM
WHAT DO YOU KNOW? Helen Morse as Mlle de Poitiers and Vivean Gray as Miss McGraw

At approximately forty years of age, Budd seems to be the matriarch of Appleyard College in Foxtel’s new vision of female hierarchy on Australia’s Colonial frontier.

Does age matter when it comes to schoolteachers in the final gasp of the Victorian era? Well, for this literary diehard, it certainly does, at least in the case of Miss McGraw.

Joan Lindsay put barely a stroke wrong in constructing her mystery, and specifically identifying McGraw’s age, leaving those of the other teachers as euphemistically middle-aged, or slightly older than the senior college students, was without doubt a deliberate plot point.

When editors took apart the original manuscript ahead of publication, lopping off the final chapter that explains the mystery, a crucial scene involving Miss McGraw was kept from readers. By identifying her age, and why she might have been more obsessed by the calculation of time than the other mistresses, Lindsay placed a clue that has rarely been noticed in half a century of analysis.

Even if the younger-than-written casting is designed to accommodate back-stories in the six 60-minute episodes, it is already working against the grain of the novel.

According to Foxtel’s head of drama Penny Win, the new adaptation: “… will take viewers on a new and in-depth journey into this incredibly iconic Australian story”.

LINDSAY
LADY LINDSAY Author Joan Lindsay (1896-1984).

Where the staff of Appleyard College are concerned, it’s apparent that vision is considerably younger than Peter Weir’s, and Joan Lindsay’s.

The original story also offers the opportunity for that rarest of beasts – the screenplay with multiple female roles, including a higher-than-usual number of women over the age of forty. For that reason alone the strategy behind the casting of younger women will take some explaining.

Imagining the impact of Hanging Rock passing across impossibly youthful faces – instead of those whose dignity has been achieved through the attainment of years – already disappoints this viewer.

The television series, due for release later in 2017, has not been without controversy. After an evocative protest, an Australian female director was hired in December 2016 to address a perceived imbalance in the recruitment of local screen talent of both genders.

To date, there’s been no commentary on what might well turn out to be ageism in the casting.

© Michael Burge, all rights reserved. Main image: ‘At the Hanging Rock’ by William Ford (1875), in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria.