What makes Judith Hearne such a compelling portrait of female alcoholism is the novel and film’s attention to the many factors that drive Judith’s drinking – the initial encouragement of her close friend that the film echoes back at us in voice-over, the ever-present fear of poverty as Judith loses more and more piano pupils (a job the film suggests she isn’t that great at in the first place), and perhaps most importantly, the dual forces of shame and loneliness that haunt her throughout the entire film. Judith needs to be physically better, yes, but she also needs to address the deeper, underlying issues that drive her “lonely passion.”
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The basic plot of Jack Clayton’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1987) reads like a light-hearted comedy of errors: the widowed brother-in-law of Judith Hearne’s landlady approaches the old spinster thinking she is rich when she is not, and Judith grows closer to him thinking that he is successful and courting her. Shenanigans and misunderstandings ensue. But Judith, played with empathy and care by Maggie Smith, is not the stereotypical spinster we typically see – nor is this a comedy of errors.
Adapted from Brian Moore’s 1955 novel of the same name with a screenplay from Peter Nelson, Judith Hearne follows the everyday life of a middle-aged piano teacher in 1950s Dublin. It is a deeply moving story of female loneliness in a character so often played for laughter or horror, if played at all. What Moore’s story and its adaptation recognize is that painful conditions like Judith’s erosion of faith, bereavement, addiction, and the loss of youth are ever-present and intertwined with one another. How does someone physically and emotionally recover when the source of her pain is so embedded in her everyday reality and fight for survival? Do Judith’s means of coping and maintaining her well-being – going to confession, attending mass, making regular visits to friends – actually help her find meaning and purpose, or do they slowly gnaw at her optimistic conviction that if she only does the right things, she will eventually be rewarded?
Judith, having spent most of her adult life caring for her dying and wealthy aunt, was left with nearly nothing and now makes money teaching children piano. We follow Judith as she moves into a new boardinghouse filled with curious characters: the landlady’s mean-spirited and spoiled adult son, a young maid from the convent, a stern schoolteacher, and most importantly, the landlady’s brother, James Madden (Bob Hoskins). As Judith makes herself at home and decorates the room with two images: a portrait of her aunt atop the fireplace and a painting of the Sacred Heart (“like having a real friend with you,” she later says) above her bed. She speaks to her aunt’s image, “Oh, things are going to be better here than the other places. I feel it. A new start. I promise.” She also hesitates before placing a bag in her closet, hiding an embarrassing secret (from who? her landlady, the Sacred Heart, her aunt, or herself?). As the film progresses we get more hints that something darker lingers beneath the surface of Judith Hearne, accompanied by whispers that her previous housing situation ended on poor terms. There is a cycle she cannot escape, which threatens to catch up with her “new start.”
It is not until a stressful encounter with her landlady that Judith finally opens the closet to reveal her shameful secret: a bottle of whiskey. She opens the bottle and turns her two portraits away from her when she drinks, suggesting that just like her Catholicism, her vices have a ritualistic quality to them. We also get the sense that while Judith is always alone, she is also never alone because of the portraits watching her every move, the lack of privacy in the boardinghouse, and her need to go to confession after drinking.
What makes Judith Hearne such a compelling portrait of female alcoholism is the novel and film’s attention to the many factors that drive Judith’s drinking – the initial encouragement of her close friend that the film echoes back at us in voice-over, the ever-present fear of poverty as Judith loses more and more piano pupils (a job the film suggests she isn’t that great at in the first place), and perhaps most importantly, the dual forces of shame and loneliness that haunt her throughout the entire film. Judith needs to be physically better, yes, but she also needs to address the deeper, underlying issues that drive her “lonely passion.”
Clayton, the director, was a fan of Moore’s book and tried unsuccessfully to option the screen rights years before. Thankfully, it fell into his hands over two decades later – escaping the long, long list of unrealized or cancelled Clayton films. The director was famously particular about the projects he chose, and it’s not hard to imagine what drew him to Judith Hearne, a story about the tragedy one can find in postwar ordinariness. The story was also fascinating to Smith (who previously worked with Clayton in The Pumpkin Eater) and Hoskins, both of whom appeared in the film at one-third of their normal fee. Maintaining the 1950s time period but moving the story to Dublin, Clayton aimed to maintain a lower budget and “indicate visually and aurally that it occurs in some vague limbo around the end of the ’50s.” Despite coming out in 1987, Clayton’s decision not to update Judith Hearne (along with the fact that he first pitched the movie in 1961) makes it a fascinating companion to his work throughout the sixties.
Clayton’s directorial work is a key starting point for the British New Wave of kitchen sink realist cinema, but unlike Room at the Top (1969) or even The Pumpkin Eater (1964), which focus on the trappings of marriage and domestic life, Judith Hearne centers around a protagonist with little to no social connections at all. Her closest confidants are the pictures on her wall – a dead mother-figure and God – neither of whom can satisfyingly respond to her happiness, tears, or anger. For Judith to get better, she needs to look within. If the leading contributors to kitchen sink realism were broadly labelled as “angry young men,” Judith Hearne takes us to the angry old woman to show us how the fantasy of a perfect family and the oppressive sacrifices one must make to try and conform to it harms both men and women, young and old, married and unmarried.
Similarly, while Clayton’s The Innocents (a 1961 retelling of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw) and Our Mother’s House (1967) are both gothic tales that center around children, the only children we see in Judith Hearne are the seemingly average family Judith occasionally visits, who snicker at the way she always calls out “It’s only me!” when she walks in. The children’s brief imitation is more cutting than they realize. It is “only her,” indeed. Oppressing Judith, rather, is her own desire for companionship, marriage, and family. Having troubled relations, Judith thinks, is at the very least better than having no relations; a condition that essentially renders her invisible to the world. To be outside of these domestic or social systems, the film suggests, does not mean one is exempt from their gravitational pull and crushing influence. Independence may keep Judith from some trappings of domestic life, but it does not free her from obligation, loneliness, or shame. Unfortunately for Judith, recovery cannot lie in romantic union. Clayton resists the sentimentality of marriage as the default “happy end,” or as something that can fix all one’s problems.
Even if there was an argument for a worthy partner, James Madden is far from ideal. Unfortunately, Judith is quickly swept away by Madden’s shallow flattery. Madden is crude, arrogantly blind to his own incompetence, estranged from his daughter, and a rapist. Willfully blind to his faults, Judith talks herself into the match and forces the fantasy to stay alive. Smith plays Hearne’s self-delusion with a quiet desperation, marked by constant self-interruption suggesting false starts on even the sentence level. Speaking to a priest, she ruminates, “We’re about to become engaged, but Father, Father he lied. No, no, no he didn’t but – no, he’s a decent man. He’s a churchgoer. Isn’t that – doesn’t that, you know – doesn’t that make it all right? I mean, if he’ll be all right, then – won’t it?”
Yet he becomes the object of Judith’s affections, which forces the two of them into many awkward interactions where his coarse loudness is further contrasted with her quiet and gentle mannerisms. Hoskins’s performance as Madden is a grating one to many film critics. His “crude Americanisms,” as Janet Maslin terms them in her New York Times review, include banging on the table and declaring New York the “best city in the world,” listing off every New York bridge in casual conversation and trying to seduce Judith into a business deal to bring “American quick lunch” to Dublin. He brags that he was “in the hotel business right on Times Square,” conveniently leaving out that he worked in those hotels as a doorman. Clayton and Moore imbue Madden, unimpressive and inconspicuous, with what seems to be a disproportionate power over Judith. Like Judith, we want more from Madden’s character – but isn’t there also a truth about the devastation so often left in the aftermath of completely undistinguished and mediocre men? His obvious pretentions beside Smith’s subtle acting create a key distinction between their lies: Madden’s lies reveal a man who carelessly and callousness hurt many in his wake, while Judith’s lies are a form of self-protection. However, it is precisely this fantasy that traps Judith and pushes her further into the temporary escape of alcohol.
The misunderstanding eventually comes to light, leading to an explosive confrontation with all the main members of the boardinghouse and a romantic rejection that forces Judith out. Following her exit, she goes on a spending spree by withdrawing the remainder of her savings account (a precise fifty-seven pounds, seventeen shillings, and eight pence), booking a room at the pricey Shelbourne Hotel, and starting a devastating bender. She pays the remainder of her rent and tells her landlady to keep the change. We then watch as she makes visits via taxi and keeps it waiting as she moves from place to place. Though unspoken, Judith’s careless spending and abandonment of all self-preservation makes us fear for the worst – with no prospects, what is the point of trying to live at all?
Those more familiar with the withering gazes, quick wit, and immense dignity of Maggie Smith’s later roles, or even her confident bravado in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, will likely feel caught off-guard by the emotional pitch and naiveté of Judith Hearne, as Smith moves from awkward desperation to rage to belligerency. Crucially, we see Judith’s carefully crafted image shatter in a few key moments, including an upsetting, red-faced rage when her whiskey is spilled during a fight with her landlady’s son and a desperate visit to the tired priest at her Church. Judith Hearne is a spinster’s tale, but Judith’s slow loss of faith is just as emotionally devastating as her failed romantic prospects. Clayton, through Judith’s escalating doubt, suggests that she seeks anyone – God, Madden, her old school friends – to fill the emptiness she feels in her life. Even the nickname she and her friend have for alcohol, “holy water” or “the holy stuff,” implies that Judith’s relationship with the church impacts every aspect of her life. When a drunk Judith, in an emotional climax of the film, yells and falls in front of the pulpit before desperately clawing at the tabernacle to find God, to see him, we recognize that this search is not just for a heavenly father but something more material. She yells, the angriest we have seen her in all the film, “I hate you! Are you really in there? Did you hear me?” and frantically calls, “Open! Open! Let me in. I want to be with you.” Judith yearns for what God promises: a companion, a friend, a father, a partner, and all the love and care that comes with that unconditional love.
The film departs from the novel at the conclusion, a decision that gives the fictional Judith Hearne a small victory at the expense of what some consider the superior portrait of faith in the novel’s ending. Bert Cardullo criticizes the ending for turning the focus back to failed courtship, which he argues “is not an agon in itself but the trigger for Judith’s religious agon.” Following the drunken episode at the church, Judith enters a convalescent home to recover thanks to the help of her friend (the happily married Moira, whose kindness to Judith often reads as an uncomfortable pity). Whereas Moore ends with Judith alone at the home, Clayton’s film brings Madden back one more time with a marriage proposal based on a continued misunderstanding of her wealth. It’s a bit of a flimsy excuse for bringing the two back together, but it gives Judith the opportunity to speak candidly about her reality:
I’ve been waiting for you. Years I’ve been waiting. Years. Every month out of twelve months. Praying for it, hoping. A woman never gives up her hopes. There’s always a Mr. Right, they say, changing as the years go by. Well. Y’know, he’s tall, dark, and handsome in the beginning and then, well, you’re not so young, and he’s middle-aged and funny looking and common as dirt, and grab anybody who gives you so much as a kind word, and that’s your prince, sent to keep you from being alone. And love, that’s forgotten, you’re just supposed to take him, even though you know he doesn’t want you. All he wants is an American quick lunch.
The two then part more definitively, and Judith returns to her recovery. The conclusion is a small victory. She exits the convalescent home in good health and prepared to make do, just as she’s always done. We end with a final scene of a presumably sober Judith in a cab, having survived some version of religious rehab, tossing the piece of paper containing Madden’s address into the wind. A bit saccharine? Yes. But one cannot help but doubt whether this is another one of those “new starts” Judith is used to making. Roger Ebert writes, “Courage and clarity will not heal Judith unless they come after sobriety – without which, for her, even the best intentions will end with another ritualistic search for the bottle in the back of the closet.” This is another compelling aspect of Judith Hearne’s portrayal of alcoholism: backsliding and relapses are never completely unthinkable. Clayton provides viewers with an ending where little has changed in Judith’s real circumstance – her life will likely remain much as it was before – but she has chosen her life over the illusion we’ve watched her conjure around Madden. Judith’s problems do not disappear, but in seeing her life more clearly, she may better endure her loneliness. It is not the triumphant ride into the sunset, but a triumph nonetheless.
Works Cited
Cardullo, Bert, “Divided Passions,” The Hudson Review 42:1 (Spring 1998), 108-116
Ebert, Roger, “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne,” RogerEbert.com, February 19, 1988 https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-lonely-passion-of-judith-hearne-1988
Maslin, Janet, “Film: ‘Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne,’” New York Times, December 23, 1987 https://www.nytimes.com/1987/12/23/movies/film-lonely-passion-of-judith-hearne.html
“The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne,” BFI Film Institute http://collections-search.bfi.org.uk/web/Details/ChoiceFilmWorks/150346797
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Unless otherwise noted, all images are screenshots from trailers and videos of the film.
