The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (Jack Conway, 1987)

Maggie Smith and Bob Hoskins in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

Cast: Maggie Smith, Bob Hoskins, Wendy Hiller, Marie Kean, Ian McNeice, Alan Devlin, Rudi Davies, Prunella Scales, Áine Ní Mhuiri, Sheila Reid. Screenplay: Peter Nelson, based on a book by Brian Moore. Cinematography: Peter Hannan. Production design: Michael Pickwoad. Film editing: Terry Rawlings. Music: Georges Delerue.

The Dublin of The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is a nest of vipers, full of people with stunted lives, blinkered vision, and downright meanness. The effect of this is to make Judith Hearne (Maggie Smith) look good by comparison, even though her life has been stunted and her vision is none too wide either. Perhaps she has had enough of the meanness exhibited by her late Aunt D'Arcy (Wendy Hiller) and by her spiky landlady (Marie Kean) and the other denizens of the boarding house into which she has recently moved, that she seems almost sunny and pleasant as if to defy them. She carries with her two icons of her past: a dour portrait of her aunt and a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. These images represent her efforts to control her alcoholism through self-discipline and religion, but the truth is that both only serve to make the problem worse, exacerbating her guilt when she fails at the task. In late middle age, with a small annuity and a clump of savings, she has little to look forward to, so she grasps at anything that represents hope -- or at least a surcease from loneliness -- which manifests itself as her landlady's brother, James Madden (Bob Hoskins), a stubby middle-aged man with a neatly trimmed mustache who has recently returned from the United States. He's a phony, of course, a man full of schemes like opening a hamburger restaurant in Dublin that will never turn out, and whose American career in the New York hotel business amounted to being a doorman. He latches on to Judith because he thinks she has money stashed away. She gravitates to him because he represents a wider world than she has known in her years taking care of her aunt and earning a little money by giving piano lessons. It's a bleak and unforgiving tale, spiked with a little unsavory sex -- the rivalry between Madden and his nephew (Ian McNeice), a corpulent would-be poet who sponges off of his mother, for the attentions of the housemaid Mary (Rudi Davies), whom Madden rapes when she spurns him. No one comes off well in this movie, but I couldn't help being drawn in by the performances of Smith, Hoskins, Hiller, and the others, even when their characters were at their most unlikable.

A Handful of Dust (Charles Sturridge, 1988)

A Handful of Dust (Charles Sturridge, 1988)

Cast: James Wilby, Kristin Scott Thomas, Rupert Graves, Judi Dench, Alec Guinness, Anjelica Huston, Pip Torrens, Stephen Fry, Jackson Kyle, Christopher Godwin. Screenplay: Tim Sullivan, Derek Granger, Charles Sturridge, based on a novel by Evelyn Waugh. Cinematography: Peter Hannan. Production design: Eileen Diss, Chris Townsend. Film editing: Peter Coulson. Music: George Fenton.

Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust is a sharp-edged, cold-hearted satirical novel whose plot turns on the death of a child. Any adaptation needs to be willing to be as ruthless as the novelist in its portrait of the feckless upper classes of Great Britain in the period between two World Wars, but instead Charles Sturridge's version gives us yet another handsomely mounted, elegantly clad film in the Merchant Ivory vein -- without the intelligence of Ismail Merchant's producing, James Ivory's direction, and particularly Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's screenplays, which managed to capture the tone of the novels they adapted with precision. Its leads, James Wilby as the ill-fated Tony Last and Kristin Scott Thomas as his unfaithful wife, Brenda, are handsome but a little too attractive to capture the fatal emptiness of the characters. Scott Thomas almost suggests the depths of Brenda's vanity in the crucial scene in which she receives the news of her young son's death -- at first she thinks she's being told that her lover has died, but when she hears that it's her son, she impulsively mutters, "Oh, thank God," before realizing the enormity of what she has just said. Unfortunately, Sturridge hasn't prepared us for the moment -- he has made Brenda too engaging a character for so wicked a reaction. Nor has Sturridge allowed Tony to be enough of a silly ass for him to deserve the fate he receives at the end of the film. The supporting players fare better: Rupert Graves lets us know from the start that John Beaver is a callow gold-digger; Judi Dench is suitably brassy as his upwardly mobile mother; and Alec Guinness makes a convincingly subtle monster out of Mr. Todd. Anjelica Huston brings her usual smartness to what amounts to a cameo role as Mrs. Rattery, a rich American whose perspective on the Brits and their preoccupation with class and the past opens Tony's eyes, even if a bit too late. Unfortunately, any substance that the film carries over from Waugh's novel has been slicked over with glossy production values and sapped by a timidity about depicting the characters as sharply as the author did.

Insignificance (Nicolas Roeg, 1985)

Insignificance (Nicolas Roeg, 1985)

Cast: Theresa Russell, Michael Emil, Gary Busey, Tony Curtis, Will Sampson, Patrick Kilpatrick. Screenplay: Terry Johnson. Cinematography: Peter Hannan. Production design: David Brockhurst. Film editing: Tony Lawson. Music: Stanley Myers, Hans Zimmer.

The imaginary conversation, bringing together people who never really met, is a time-honored way of exploring ideas, which is what Terry Johnson had in mind when he wrote a play about the encounter of Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Joe McCarthy, and Joe DiMaggio in a hotel room in 1952. To emphasize the fact that it was a play about ideas, he didn't call them by their real names but labeled them The Actress, The Professor, The Senator, and The Ballplayer. They could have been called Sex, Intellect, Politics, and Muscle, for all that matters. What we have in the film version is a sometimes provocative but for the most part muddled intersection of people whose myths are larger than their actuality. In the movie's best scene, Marilyn uses some toys and balloons to demonstrate to Einstein that she actually knows the theory of relativity. Whether she understands it, she admits, is another matter. At this point, the film verges on something like an exploration of ideas, the relationship between knowledge and understanding. But that's too much for a film to explore and still hold an audience's attention, so mostly we are left in Insignificance with an exploration of personalities, riddled with flashbacks to scenes from the lives of Marilyn, Einstein, and DiMaggio -- but not, interestingly, to McCarthy's life, which makes his inclusion in this stew of celebrities a problem to be pondered. He's there primarily to underscore Einstein's sense of guilt at having come up with ideas that contributed to the creation of the atomic bomb and hence the Cold War that caused the rise of McCarthyism. There's really no way to resolve the various conflicts among the characters than to end with a fantasy scene in which the hotel room is destroyed in an atomic cataclysm -- only to reverse the footage of destruction for a scene in which Marilyn bids Einstein goodbye. In the end, the film becomes mostly a story about the loss of identity suffered by celebrities, aided by some very good performances but undercut by a surplus of images that demand but don't reward interpretation.