Eclipse, The (2009)

January 6, 2011

by Nathan Shumate

Directed by Conor McPherson
Written by Conor McPherson and Billy Roche, based on Tales From Rainwater Pond by Billy Roche
Starring
- Ciaran Hinds
- Iben Hjelje
- Aidan Quinn
- Jim Norton
- Avian Egan
Produced by Robert Walpole
Executive produced by Paddy McDonald and Rebecca O’Flanagan

The Eclipse is infuriatingly close to being a very good movie. It’s got compelling grown-up characters who speak and behave like adults (even when they’re being infantile), meaty emotional problems, and and understated pace and presentation which exhibits confidence in a mature audience to fill in details that aren’t spelled out for them. Unfortunately, the premise revolves around a setup which doesn’t ever get a payoff; the questions it answers aren’t the questions it raises.

A promotional consideration was paid by…

The backdrop is a literary festival in the small Irish village of Cobh. Michael (Ciaran Hinds) is a fifty-something woodshop teacher who, while still part of the writing community, hasn’t written anything for years. He’s also recently widowed; his wife Eleanor (Avian Egan) succumbed to cancer, leaving him with a teen and a preteen. Michael, as realized by Hinds, is a big man whose resigned expression and careful mode of speech tell more about him than bushels of exposition ever could.

“Here in Ireland, we don’t have alleycats. Mainly because we don’t have alleys.”

Just as the literary festival starts, Michael starts seeing things. Not ghosts, exactly; in the middle of the night he thinks he sees his father-in-law Malachy (Jim Norton) wandering around the house, even though Malachy is still alive – wheelchair-bound in a retirement home, having outlived both his wife and his daughter. This kind of odd encounter gives him more than a normal interest in Lena (Iben Hjelje), a quiet and thoughtful London writer whose recent popular novel, The Eclipse, is a fictional crystallization in her own lifelong interest in ghosts. Michael is assigned by the festival to be Lena’s driver and “minder,” and his deep interest in her book – along, one assumes, with his quiet and passive demeanor despite his size, in contrast to the throngs of people who desperately want something from her – engenders between them an understated friendship, with the possibility of something more.

Cemetery in a churchyard: You’re doing it wrong.

The fly in the ointment is Nicholas (Aidan Quinn with a dashing salt-and-pepper beard), a bestselling novelist also headlining at the festival. Nicholas is charming and confident in front of audiences; privately, he’s a self-centered jerk. Not only does he hold all the “hangers-on” at such literary festivals in contempt – and that of course includes Michael – but he’s been obsessing over Lena, ready to leave his wife for her because of a one-night stand a year ago at another festival that she’s trying to pretend never happened.

Writing in a garret. It’s all the rage!

So. Why is Michael being haunted by his as-yet living father-in-law, when the psychological “haunting” of his wife’s death is so much more traumatic for him? I’ll tell you: I don’t know. The mystery is never solved, nor is it brought to any sort of non-explanatory catharsis. There are a couple of terrific fright scenes with the black-eyeballed, black-mouthed ghost – more terrific because they appear without warning in a movie that, for the rest of its running time, isn’t at all foreboding – but they never gel into anything. Yes, there is a catharsis for Michael, as he deals with Eleanor’s death and his fear that he might someday start to forget her, but the ghostly aspect of the story seems detached and random. True, those episodes help bring him to Lena, and her presence, I suppose, helps him work past his grief (having the opportunity to punch Nicholas in the face probably helps, too), but can we say that that’s the “reason” for the haunting, either in terms of character’s motivations or in terms of the mechanics filmmakers use to drive the plot?

Everyone has this kind of nightmare about their father-in-law, right?

It’s a visually beautiful film, more so because director McPherson sidesteps the temptation to linger brazenly on the iconic countryside and instead lets it sit quietly in the background. (Okay, there’s one scene which takes place in and around a roofless medieval stone church which now houses graves inside its ruined walls, but I’m not going to begrudge that flaunting of the unique visual beauty available in Ireland.) The acting and script mesh perfectly, making it appear as if the actors are ad-libbing without the meandering pointlessness that actual ad-libbing usually entails. As much as I appreciate supernatural and other genre elements in the movies I watch, I almost wonder if this wouldn’t have been a stronger movie if all of the bits about the overt haunting had been excised, either through another draft of the screenplay or on the cutting room floor. It spoils the sense of catharsis that the main dramatic narrative crafts so carefully; it leaves the movie feeling unfinished.