Am I Missing Something?

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

... 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.

I don't really know what else to say about this. It was dull. Dull, dull, dull.The acting was fine, but with nowhere to go. And I don't think it made much sense to have the boy as the narrator. I'd personally favor the eldest sister, Kate, or the 'simple' sister, Rose in that role.So much more could have been done with this film. The character of Father Jack was interesting, perhaps there could have been more with him, or maybe we could have found out more about Kate whom we get almost no understanding of at all. And why did the boy love that summer? We don't actually see enough of him to figure it out.This movie did not intrigue or entertain. It could have been better, but it wasn't. Try it out if you'd like, but my advice is, 'Don't waste your time.'

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.

I can't think of anything to add, change, improve, edit out, etc. about his film. I knew almost nothing about it when I saw it, so I was caught totally by surprise by its excellence. The best film I have seen for a loooong while.