The Homecoming

Michael Jayston brings his wife and mother of their three children, Vivien Merchant, to meet his father, uncle and two brothers in the film adaptation of Harold Pinter's Tony-winning play.

It's a fine adaptation of this one-set play, and director Peter Hall leaves it in that set - there is one shot where Miss Merchant steps onto the street for a walk. He does move the camera around for a constant variation in viewpoint. The actors, who include Cyril Cusack and Ian Holm (the role won his m a Tony) is superb.

I have some aesthetic issues with Pinter's works. Like Albee's WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? this is an exercise in revealing the ugly sides of people in a constant storm of abuse. The plot, therefore, consists of the revelation of character to the audience, rather than the more usual arc of character change. I also wonder - probably irrelevantly - about Pinter's home life. The IMDb claims that Pinter's family was close. Why then did he write plays about the miseries of being in a family?

I think that if you wish to see what it looks like when you grind five thousand feet of misery, this is a fine movie. Me, I think I'll watch a comedy.

'The Homecoming' is perhaps Pinter's greatest play. It still seems as impenetrable and unfathomably disturbing as when first performed. As if Pinter had managed to haul it straight up from the murky waters of his subconscious without allowing it to be filtered through the clarifying, taming grilles of symmetry and craft.

A few of the other commentators have questioned whether it works as a piece of 'cinema'. But with writing and acting this vital and rich the query becomes redundant. It's a filmed record of a stage play in which color and framing are used to provide texture and ambiance for the text. The absence of any unnecessary cinematic flourishes contributes to the stark, claustrophobic atmosphere.

I would argue that the piece is more effective here, atmospherically speaking at least, than it ever could be on stage. The screen filling close-ups, slow fades to black, and subtle, almost imperceptible camera movement all add the palpable sense of entrapment, tension and menace.

The performances are all majestic. But my favourite is the astonishing one given by the wonderful Vivien Merchant. Her work in this and Sidney Lumet's 'The Offence' (in the same year) stand, for me, as being amongst the greatest performances given on screen by any actor. Ever. She can switch from poignantly lost and alone, to ironic, to chillingly manipulative with a glance. Whilst always radiating an almost heartbreaking aura of emotional privation and defeat. Her premature death was a genuine tragedy.

Am I alone in finding such a spare, bleak work so strangely comforting, even uplifting? I hope not.

As the above comments reveal, this is a wonderful, deeply disturbing, but also riotously comic play. I did it for English 'A' level which was pure madness - difficult enough getting my head round it at my now considerably more advanced age. Having seen Ian Holm give a riveting performance in London as Max, I really leapt at the chance to see this as the local arts cinema and it was gripping. Ian Holm was fantastic, with more than a touch of the Del Boy about him (re-watch the play and see its Only Fools and Horses connections- the grotty flat, the brother-uncle-father dynamic, the dead worshipped prostitute mother etc) and Teddy was played with a wonderful swagger. The scene where all four of them stand in a corridor lighting their cigars was comic and tragic and menacing in the best way. But I really wonder how cinematic any of this was? You have the feeling of watching theatrical performance preserved in aspic rather than a film. The scene outside the flat was contrived and unnecessary and other than that pretty much all the action took place in one room. I feel we lost rather than gained from the live experience of watching a play. But, not having been alive when this film was made, it does mean I get to get a glimpse of a towering production of an amazing play. And that can't be a bad thing.

My comments are partially a response to "My Mind Parasites must be dead".

I wish that I could talk with the author of the comments more to get an understanding of his reaction to the film. For the first hour or so, I was thinking some of the same things about it. I slogged through what I thought was just going to be a lot of angry, repressed people in a rotten, emotionally poisoned family just to say that I had seen it.

At first I found it very irritating that people would sling words at each other with barbs of hatred attached. A lot of the dialog seemed stilted and somewhat like lectures. And the words and the emotions often had very little to do with each other. Eventually I realized that this was just fleshing out the characters. It even seemed like a substitute for conversation by people that had completely forgotten how to communicate with each other.

During the last thirty minutes or so we've been given a tour of what five different people will do when immersed in an aquarium devoid of the oxygen of any sort of positive emotional bonds. What Pinter seems to be doing is taking five possible approaches and carrying them to their extremes. Although the possible ways that each character could have developed are endless, the thrust of each is representative: sex, violence, and shut-down.

I found myself most fascinated with trying to guess what Teddy was thinking and feeling. I imagined mostly bottled rage, but perhaps instead, relief at leaving it all behind. In a way Ruth's character was the most fascinating because she had only tangentially been exposed to the family by marrying into it. But by the end of the play, she had developed a complete, and for her, necessary response to her environment.

To the author of "My mind parasites must be dead", I hope that it had no resonance with you because your family life bore no resemblance to the play. For most of the rest of us, there was probably a lot too much of "oh, yeah", "unh-huh", "yep", "been there, done that", "that's just like my uncle/brother/dad/me." Painful but cathartic.

"The Homecoming" is a masterpiece of a play, and it is transferred very skillfully to the screen. The screenplay differs little from the original text, except that Peter Hall allows the camera to linger on the phallic imagery of Max's walking stick and the various men's cigars. Needless to say, the acting is superb. Ian Holm shines as the amusing but insidious Lenny, as does Cyril Cusack as his aggressive but impotent father. The star of the film, however, is Vivien Merchant, whose portrayal of Ruth is hypnotic and captivating. This is one of Pinter's finest works. A must-see.