Byrdz
It's a pleasant enough little film that gives a look at 1930's Ireland via a family of five single sisters and a missionary brother, a love child and that child's wayward father.The acting is fine. The script worth listening to. But it's just another look at the daily events in the life of a rural Irish family. Nothing special. Nothing compelling. As is common with films, the characters are just dumped out and not properly introduced. They all look somewhat alike and it's shot with poor lighting which makes it difficult to tell just who is who.Of all the people in the film the elder brother and the vagabond lover/father are the most interesting.Have some time to spend? You could do worse but you could do better. It's just nothing special.
valerie-clarke
... to enjoy this film. I had five Italian aunts and the insights into their sisterly relations appear to me spot on. So often in relationship stories, each character is a paragon of one virtue. Not true in "Dancing in Lughnasa" where the women are not prototypical but rather complex and totally unself-conscious individuals.As one of the finest actors of her time, to her credit, Meryl Streep doesn't overpower the excellent ensemble cast. Even the men players, who are figuratively essential but literally superfluous to the survivl of this family, are presented as whole people. They are neither villains or heroes; just men. Go figure!In a film that depends on the actors' considerable restraint in exposing the internal and external dramas of the plot, there are two wonderful moments of abandon near the end: the essential dances of life ... the dance of faith, hope and charity and the dance of decadenced, despair, and destruction.An overall enjoyable entertainment, the film fails only in not giving the audience a better understanding of the implacable, irreversible outside forces in the world working against the family. This is film after all where we expect to be shown as well as told.
Mashi69
Like all those who have criticized this movie, I too missed the point, because to me it just seemed a less than ordinary movie about ordinary people. I never saw the stage play, perhaps here lies the rub: that kind of continuity that films need (and plays don't, being divided into macro scenes) is totally lacking. The result is that the structure of this movie slackens and shows gaps as big as those of matter at the molecular level. I agree, the setting is beautiful: movies dealing with peoples who have strong traditions and attachment to their land must inevitably try to make the landscape one more actor. But when a work of "art" (lesser art) shows so blatantly its inner pathos-inducing mechanism, then the use of a spectacular landscape just makes things worse, as in the case of Dancing at Lughnasa: "folkloristic" in the worst acceptation of the term. Exemplary in this sense the voice off of the boy, Michael, who in the end has the nerve to say something like "I will remember those years as the most beautiful of my life" after having spent the whole movie interacting with the characters much less than any of the bushes in Mundy family's courtyard.
Figtree
This is a pretty film visually, and some of the acting was good. Although I have not seen the play on which it was based, it seemed to me that this would be better as a play than a film. My favorite films are those that make me think, or evoke strong emotions. This one did neither. It did have a nice aesthetic content, visually. And, Meryl Streep gave one of her usual masterful performances. But, I didn't care about any of the characters, except the little boy. The film just left me cold, and it didn't seem memorable.
AD
