by Quendrith Johnson, Los Angeles Correspondent
There used to be a jewel-box sized Indian restaurant beside the former Music Hall, now Lumiere Cinema on 9036 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. When asked about it, the concession worker quips, “that was a long time ago… years ago.” A strange echo to the film being shown that afternoon, Long Day’s Journey Into Night from BK Studios, starring Jessica Lange, Ed Harris, Ben Foster, and my co-attendee’s favorite film star of the moment, Colin Morgan.
Even with the backstory that this is Eugene O’Neill’s searing powerful stage play for which Lange has already won a Tony on Broadway, we’re walking into this unprepared for what the filmed version does in the two-time Oscar winner female lead’s capable hands.
This movie speaks to family drama for its time, for all time, especially now in this knock-you-back in your chair performance by Jessica Lange.
But this is just the pinnacle of a marvelous career for a Minnesota native, who went to art school, and ended up as Mary Tyrone, where the asymptotic curve of her life and art impossibly touch lines for a moment that we are all privileged to witness. Films titles roll off the shelf: Tootsie, All That Jazz, Country, Frances, never mind her TV work in “American Horror Story” or Feud’s Seasons 1 and 2, “Bette and Joan” and “Capote vs The Swans” in 2024.
This star-turn is different though, for many echoes and odd coincidences?
While Eugene O’Neill did come from an acting father and an addled mother, and there is an autobiographical through-line here? Perhaps that’s less poignant today than Lange’s top note here playing wife to an actor husband, when in real-life she once had an actor husband (also a playwright) who was just as complex to the point of an O’Neill portrayal. These personal bleeds are eerie on the periphery of such a haunted performance.
As the lore goes, Eugene O’Neill took his 1936 body-of-work Nobel Prize winnings and purchased a house in the Bay Area of San Francisco, where he penned “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” between 1939 through 1940, finishing it up in 1941. And it is this pre-WWII classic that writer David Lindsay-Abaire masterfully works into the film version.
Lange’s Tony run of the Broadway version is relevant to her performance in the Lindsay-Abaire cinema roll-out, yet there is nothing that can prepare you for what happens when sea, fog horn, silence, and maternal madness seep through the lens.
Jessica Lange in Long Day’s Journey Into Night is the only time the word “devastating” is the highest compliment acting allows, she is beyond drama into a rendition of life lived hard. It is shocking, makes you squirm, even triggers a flight response.
This is the staying power of an acting powerhouse like Lange, even when up against the formidable talent of Ed Harris, Ben Foster, and consumptive scene stealer Colin Morgan.
So let’s back up, and revisit the enduring legacy of a woman who came to Hollywood on the outstretched simian palm of a monster, KING KONG (1976), and finds her apex via Mary Tyrone in this film with the poignancy of her own hands as centerpiece in this Pulitzer Prize winner adapted for screen in Long Day’s Journey Into Night (2025).
Back to Mary Tyrone, for whom Jessica Lange mutes her star into a crone. Not just a regular crone, but a crazy old lady who’s febrile madness somehow touches the inner workings of the ugly truth about sanity. That truth being that sanity can blind us from the truth somehow?
Lange has done so many different aspects of Mad Woman, that her kaleidoscope of diagnoses somehow sharpens the focus on how we view crazy matriarchs. How these women are able to reveal something you can’t see unless it’s through the lens of mental instability. Think Blue Sky, where as Tommy Lee Jones’ wife, Carly Marshall takes on nuclear testing on horseback. This is just a prime example. Others have been threaded throughout her career, notably Hollywood’s favorite leading lady classic meltdown cautionary tale, Frances Farmer.
But what about the insanity of how this production came together, through delays, a significant death, and time?
So what happens to Long Day’s Journey Into Night this Award Season?
The sad coincidence that neither O’Neill nor Bill Kenwright, who died at 78 in 2023, got to see their production come alive is another odd detail in Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Then come the hard questions. Is this film too small, even with a larger roll-out planned apparently? Will it captivate a wide enough audience?
Fortunately Lange’s devastating, in a good way, screen portrayal will result in the Virginia Film Festival’s Visionary Award on Oct. 23, 2026 at the Paramount Theater in Charlottesville.
Hollywood Reporter’s finest Scott Feinberg will be on hand, along with TCM’s Ben Mankiewicz, son of the famed screenwriter for whom Mank (Netflix) was lovingly penned.
They will celebrate Jessica Lange on a Friday night that will hopefully kick off a serious Oscar run for her, who at lucky 77, has reached some unreachable shining moment in a lifelong career as a movie star.
All we, the audience, can do is vote with our money by seeing this movie.
Lumiere Cinema is showing the film in Beverly Hills here, VA Film Festival tickets can be found on their site. Do see this film, but come prepared for a star turn that seeps into your bones. BK Studios has more info.
[The Eugene O’Neill Theater Center has a young playwright’s award for those inspired by his work.]
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