That They May Face The Rising Sun (2023)

A reflection on the film adaptation of the classic Irish novel.

The original source material of this film adaptation by Pat Collins fell into my lap when I was in my twenties. The novel was part of a series of hardback Irish classics republished by The Irish Independent newspaper. Working in a newsagents at the time meant I had access to the copies left behind. John McGahern’s writing possessed a lyricism that seemed to exist solely to evoke a type of Irishness that had been on the decline in modern times. The Ireland of small communities, deep religiosity, natural beauty and excessive alcohol consumption. It was an Ireland that I had subconsciously been aware of but had evaded me, until my reading of this novel.

Pat Collins, a Galway based director, established a link with McGahern previously when he directed an RTE documentary on the writer entitled John McGahern: A Private World. He was a uniquely talented writer who seemed to possess an equally unique insight in to the Irish psyche. Like any great artist, he was as attuned to the darker aspects of his culture as much as he was the light. His very manner of speaking and expressing himself in the interviews were a perfect example of this dynamic in action. There seemed to be a vast well of pain beneath the surface of his syllables and cadences. His body of work also seems to mirror this duality of temperament, in one breath achingly beautiful, in the next evoking complete brutality.

This hauntingly beautiful film adaptation set in the eighties, tones down the harsher aspects of the original plot and dials up the subtly profound elements of an Irish community caught between the old Ireland and encroaching modernity. Conversations beside a stove with cups of tea or sometimes a drop of whiskey are nearly the centrepiece of the film. It is where things are expressed or more often than not, judiciously held back. Kitchen politics if you will. It is however the sense of connection and affection between the inhabitants that pervades Collins’ filmic paean to McGahern.

Joe and Kate Ruttledge have returned from London to embed themselves in the small lakeside community where Joe grew up. Barry Ward is perfect as the highly intelligent yet sensitive writer Joe. This is a role which, in lesser hands, could easily have turned sour and contrived. But Ward inhabits the character with just the right level of subtlety and pragmatism. He is a writer and in some ways the film could be interpreted as his own vision of the world. A world of simplicity, nature, human connection and sadness. The film is an artistic confluence of McGahern, Collins and the fictional protagonist Joe. All of their sensibilities merge together to sculpt and craft what we see on the screen.

Ireland is a peculiar society in the sense that it was a nineteenth century society up to about 1970 and then it almost bypassed the twentieth century. - John McGahern.

Collins has grappled with these themes of modernity and Irish culture in his excellent 2010 documentary What We Leave in Our Wake. In his filmic essay, he interviews contributors like Declan Kiberd, Leila Doolan, and Peter McVerry. McGahern himself features, Collins used archive footage from previous interviews. It is in this piece of work that one can notice the DNA of That They May Face The Rising Sun. The landscape panoramas, the merging of two worlds and the intimacy of one to one conversations are all there. Collins was destined to adapt McGahern’s greatest novel.

The strong sociological links with London can be seen in the character of Johnny Murphy, played by the great Sean McGinley. Living and working in London, he sporadically returns to the community when on leave. It is a heartbreaking performance by McGinley that manages to embody the naturally joyous nature of the Irish personality but also the suffocation and bewilderment caused by a dislocation from his roots, a feature of Irish emigration that sent many a man and woman down the path of alcoholism and destitution.

This is a wonderful film. Collins has an eye for landscapes and an ability to commit them to celluloid. People become of their localities and landscapes the longer they spend in them. This interweaving of the interior and the exterior is a very human thing but for Irish people, it seems to go somewhat deeper, whether we know it or not. The ghosts of our ancestors inhabit the wildness of landscapes like the Burren or the wilds of Kerry. Stone structures, fairy forts remind us of an ancient time that is still physically present in our localities. Holy wells hurdle us back to the times of our saints. And we wonder what they would make of modern Ireland. In Collins’ work, we get a glimpse of what this discussion might sound like. In That They May face The Rising Sun, we get probably his greatest achievement in visual arts to date.