Ryan's Daughter (1970, David Lean) (Patreon)

46/100

Like most films maudits (though this particular example was a commercial success and an Oscar-winner; it was the Canbys and Kaels who held their noses), Lean's penultimate epic proves to be more interesting than it sounds but still a fair distance from any good. I managed to go in unaware that it's a Madame Bovary riff, and so took a while to grasp that Mitchum, who looks insanely rugged (and was slightly younger at the time than I am now), is playing that Charles; this is akin to casting Brad Pitt as Rachel Weisz's kind, boring husband in The Deep Blue Sea, and arguably doomed the movie before a single frame had been exposed. Solid performance—even the Irish accent's not bad, to my ears—but "this guy's not DTF" is pretty hard to swallow. On top of which, the torrid affair (Maj. Doryan seems more Léon than Rodolphe), as reimagined here, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Rosy yearns for passion and adventure, seeks displays of testosterone (love her asking Charles to leave his shirt off when he comes in from the field for lunch), clearly wants a stereotypical man's man...so why on earth would Doryan's severe PTSD get her hot? Some women intermingle eros and the nurturing instinct, but Rosy does not seem like one of them, and Sarah Miles (whom I'd known primarily as the harried mum in Hope and Glory), though generally quite good, can't reconcile that contradiction. The entire film is thus constructed upon a rickety foundation, even before considering Bolt's somewhat awkward effort to tie in the Easter Rising and an entire subplot about gunrunners and a secret informer, with the latter serving primarily as a means of punishing Rosy while also maintaining sympathy for her.

As for John Mills' Oscar-winning turn as Michael the halfwit (as that character would surely then have been labeled), let's just say it was a different time, and while I miss much of what's been lost from those days, I do not miss that at all.

Ironically, what impressed me about Ryan's Daughter is exactly what contemporaneous reviews—written when New Hollywood was just kicking off; this film was released a few weeks after Five Easy Pieces—deemed ludicrous. Lean couldn't be more besotted with County Kerry, and shapes numerous scenes around the landscapes (especially cliffs); this might be the only film I've ever seen in which someone's amble along the beach features a shot/reverse-shot of clouds drifting beneath the sun and the striking shadows they cast. All of the most memorable scenes take place outdoors and pulse with sensuality; two of them involve footprints in the sand—first Rosy stepping barefoot into the tracks left by Charles' shoes, then Charles following Rosy and Doryan's prints and imagining how they were made. And while the big storm sequence feels as if it was imported from an entirely different movie, the sea's fury is arresting for its own sake. Oh, you know what, I lied, because everyone does exemplary work throughout the mostly interior scene of Rosy and Charles' wedding night, with their standard jitters amplified by awareness that a throng outside is imagining and cheering their consummation. (Again, though, the consummation itself requires us to believe that Robert Fucking Bedroom Eyes Mitchum treats sex as a bothersome duty to be gotten through as quickly as possible.) It's just that the good stuff adds up to maybe 40 of this film's whopping 195 minutes (minus the roadshow overture and exit music; should also perhaps mention that while some of Jarre's cues are suitably stirring, the jauntier ones threatened to drive me mad). Still, if this is the worst movie that Lean ever made—and that seems likely, though I have yet to see several ca. 1949–52 (including The Sound Barrier, which seems to have few fans)—he went out with a commendably high floor.