Product: Ryan's Daughter (Two-Disc Special Edition) (2006)
Rating: 5.0
Passions running high and a visual delight
I was given a copy of this film several years ago by my old uncle, and buried it, somehow unable to overcome a number of inherited prejudices about the film to ever put it on. When I finally did so I was staggered at my stupidity and the beauty and breadth of Lean's film.What can I say now but see this film! It's one of the masterpieces of colour cinema. The setting, the politics of Irish nationalism at odds with the occupying British forces, the parallel stories of two kinds of love; there's just layer on layer of intrigue and complexity here, and even with its mighty length, nothing extraneous or long-winded exists in it.There's so much in this movie, it puts most modern films to shame. It's not just in the story. The sheer power of the coastal landscape and its colour; the wonderful array of characters, even if there's a paucity of genuine Irish actors among the cast. Sarah Miles, a great and perhaps underrated actress, is unbelievable in her passion, a woman seeking a deeper connection with love than others around her, which leads her into big trouble. Mitchum is stoic and full of compassion and grace as her husband the schoolteacher; Trevor Howard plays the Catholic priest to the core; Leo McKern as Ryan the (re)publication sits well, and John Mills fills the shoes of a Shakespeare-like fool admirably.Lean was a great interpreter of Charles Dickens' novels in the 1940s: those films stayed with me from childhood. I liked Brief Encounter but found it too dated; I was ambivalent about Lawrence of Arabia and found Passage to India a bit too drawn out. I guess that's what I feared with this film, that it was about a world and time (WWI) in which I was not interested, done in that exegetic style of Lean's for which I never really thought I had the time. After all, the full-length version is 204 minutes, and that's a lot of film for one sitting.If you have the time, and like big experiences, with strong characters and emotional and political depth, this is the film for you.