The Homecoming (1973) Online

"There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false." - Harold Pinter

Ely Landau's American Film Theater production of Harold Pinter's The Homecoming, directed by Peter Hall, has just been released on DVD as part of a retrospective of the AFT's two years of outstanding film versions of selected plays. An engrossing rendition of Pinter's disturbing play, The Homecoming is brilliant in its malevolent and macabre humor and the performances are first rate. On the surface it is a depiction of a slightly mad family in which two brothers lust over a third brother's wife. Underneath it is a surreal caricature of domestic life that focuses on the dark impulses that lie beneath the thin veneer of civility. In Pinter's view, what passes for authentic behavior is merely a cover for the irrational and the play demonstrates how power and memory can be used as tools of control. As in all of Pinter's work, the dialogue is razor sharp and often over the top, consisting of verbal thrusts and parries, ridicules, strategies, mutual warfare, and maneuvering for position.

Set in an older but spacious house in North London, the men prowl around each other like animals ready for the kill. Their mother Jessie is dead. The remaining family consists of two brothers, their father and uncle. Max (Paul Rogers), the menacing, slightly demented but still roaring old patriarch is a retired butcher with an acid tongue. His brother, Sam, a chauffeur is an unmarried man in his sixties and something of a dandy. The brothers are both working class louts. Lenny, delightfully performed by a dapper Ian Holm, is a sleazy pimp and borderline criminal, while Joey (Terence Rigby) is a demolitions expert and would-be boxer who spends most of his spare time training at the local gym.

The equilibrium is disturbed when the oldest brother Teddy (Michael Jayston), a Professor of Philosophy, arrives with Ruth, his wife of nine years Ruth (Pinter's wife at the time, Vivien Merchant) in London to visit the family she has never met. The focus of the hostility is now focused on the young couple and the father unleashes one tirade after another, calling Ruth a slut and a whore. From the beginning there is tension in the relationship between Teddy and Ruth and they both seem uncomfortable. The dialogue between family members is filled with comic touches and the characters use threats, intimidation, and power games to gain advantage over each other.

Even Ruth, a woman who has been exploited successfully plays off one brother against the other and both against her husband. Rationality becomes less and less apparent as the play progresses with the two younger brothers making passes at Ruth in front of her bewildered and strangely passive husband. Teddy only watches as Ruth joins with his brothers, perhaps because he realizes that on the deepest level he has been separate from her for years. The Homecoming is a work that does not yield to immediate deciphering and has given critics much to chew on for thirty-nine years. Pinter's plays are not about psychological realism and the actions of his characters are not always coherent or rational. He moves easily from realism to surrealism, and it is often difficult to distinguish between the reality and the dream.

One critic said, "Like Buñuel, Pinter demonstrated that only a slight shift in perspective is needed to make human behavior appear insane, and showed how easily the veneer of 'civilization' can be swept aside in favor of something more revealing". The Homecoming can be looked at it in many ways and there is enough ambiguity to allow the audience to interpret it from their own frame of reference. As Pinter biographer Michael Billington notes, "You can never say with Pinter that one interpretation is wholly right or another wholly wrong. What you can say, with reasonable certainty, is that the play continues to get under our collective skins". It definitely got under mine but I loved every minute of it.

'The Homecoming' is perhaps Pinter's greatest play. It still seems as impenetrable and unfathomably disturbing as when first performed. As if Pinter had managed to haul it straight up from the murky waters of his subconscious without allowing it to be filtered through the clarifying, taming grilles of symmetry and craft.

A few of the other commentators have questioned whether it works as a piece of 'cinema'. But with writing and acting this vital and rich the query becomes redundant. It's a filmed record of a stage play in which color and framing are used to provide texture and ambiance for the text. The absence of any unnecessary cinematic flourishes contributes to the stark, claustrophobic atmosphere.

I would argue that the piece is more effective here, atmospherically speaking at least, than it ever could be on stage. The screen filling close-ups, slow fades to black, and subtle, almost imperceptible camera movement all add the palpable sense of entrapment, tension and menace.

The performances are all majestic. But my favourite is the astonishing one given by the wonderful Vivien Merchant. Her work in this and Sidney Lumet's 'The Offence' (in the same year) stand, for me, as being amongst the greatest performances given on screen by any actor. Ever. She can switch from poignantly lost and alone, to ironic, to chillingly manipulative with a glance. Whilst always radiating an almost heartbreaking aura of emotional privation and defeat. Her premature death was a genuine tragedy.

Am I alone in finding such a spare, bleak work so strangely comforting, even uplifting? I hope not.

'The Homecoming' shows Pinter at his very best. This is a world in which family members endlessly battle it out for dominance and control. Every word and gesture is calculated to undermine and gain advantage over another character. Every pause is an opportunity to assess strategy and may herald a new attack. It's like watching a game of chess where power constantly shifts between players with each offensive/defensive move. Completely enthralling.

Vivien Merchant is utterly brilliant. I know of no other actor with her talent for portraying character and mood through body language and movement. A slight turn of her head away from her husband paints an instant picture of Ruth's emotionally barren marriage. Her controlled stillness in the face of threats by various male characters conveys Ruth's amused contempt for them. A subtle ankle movement portrays Ruth's knowing manipulation of her sexual magnetism in this all male environment. And yet - while depicting Ruth's power - Merchant's performance is underscored with a strong sense of disillusionment, isolation and emotional damage which captures all of the ambiguities in Ruth's character and gives this bleak play a soul. This is acting at the highest level.

The first thing that should be emphasised I think is if you you get the chance I strongly recommend you see the play at the theatre, somehow Pinter's famous pauses seem longer on the stage, and the claustrophobia of the piece is maintained far better than when you watch it on the screen. Nevertheless if you have seen the play (or even if you haven't) you really should watch this film version. Firstly it is directed by the fantastic Peter Hall, one of the great stage directors of the era (and still a great stage director) and thus he is able to remain true to the stage format of the play, while also maintaining a strong cinematic emphasis, this is not just a recording of a stage play. Secondly it features some truly fine actors including the fantastic Vivienne Merchant. Being Pinter's wife she seems to have a unique understanding of the words and is able to convey this onto the audience, her first conversation when she meets Lenny (Ian Holm) particularly sticks in the mind. Ian Holm and Paul Rogers are also fantastic along with the rest of the cast who have names as well known on the stage as they are on the screen. Overall I don't believe I've seen a finer adaptation of a play for the screen.

I do think the film is cinematic, and the editing, photography, and art direction all put this in the realm of suburb film making.

Yes, it is Pinter at his peak, and most of the cast knew the play well (the new cast members probably only added freshness) from done long runs years before. Having seen most of them, I would say this must surely be the jewel in the AFT crown. Unlike the Pinter directed "Butley" it has grown rather than diminished by the years.

This is one of those film plays (Glengarry Glen Ross may be another) does commit the crime of doing the play so well that it pretty much makes further productions useless. The film of "The Caretaker" done some years earlier is also very strong.

As the above comments reveal, this is a wonderful, deeply disturbing, but also riotously comic play. I did it for English 'A' level which was pure madness - difficult enough getting my head round it at my now considerably more advanced age. Having seen Ian Holm give a riveting performance in London as Max, I really leapt at the chance to see this as the local arts cinema and it was gripping. Ian Holm was fantastic, with more than a touch of the Del Boy about him (re-watch the play and see its Only Fools and Horses connections- the grotty flat, the brother-uncle-father dynamic, the dead worshipped prostitute mother etc) and Teddy was played with a wonderful swagger. The scene where all four of them stand in a corridor lighting their cigars was comic and tragic and menacing in the best way. But I really wonder how cinematic any of this was? You have the feeling of watching theatrical performance preserved in aspic rather than a film. The scene outside the flat was contrived and unnecessary and other than that pretty much all the action took place in one room. I feel we lost rather than gained from the live experience of watching a play. But, not having been alive when this film was made, it does mean I get to get a glimpse of a towering production of an amazing play. And that can't be a bad thing.

"The Homecoming" is a masterpiece of a play, and it is transferred very skillfully to the screen. The screenplay differs little from the original text, except that Peter Hall allows the camera to linger on the phallic imagery of Max's walking stick and the various men's cigars. Needless to say, the acting is superb. Ian Holm shines as the amusing but insidious Lenny, as does Cyril Cusack as his aggressive but impotent father. The star of the film, however, is Vivien Merchant, whose portrayal of Ruth is hypnotic and captivating. This is one of Pinter's finest works. A must-see.

My comments are partially a response to "My Mind Parasites must be dead".

I wish that I could talk with the author of the comments more to get an understanding of his reaction to the film. For the first hour or so, I was thinking some of the same things about it. I slogged through what I thought was just going to be a lot of angry, repressed people in a rotten, emotionally poisoned family just to say that I had seen it.

At first I found it very irritating that people would sling words at each other with barbs of hatred attached. A lot of the dialog seemed stilted and somewhat like lectures. And the words and the emotions often had very little to do with each other. Eventually I realized that this was just fleshing out the characters. It even seemed like a substitute for conversation by people that had completely forgotten how to communicate with each other.

During the last thirty minutes or so we've been given a tour of what five different people will do when immersed in an aquarium devoid of the oxygen of any sort of positive emotional bonds. What Pinter seems to be doing is taking five possible approaches and carrying them to their extremes. Although the possible ways that each character could have developed are endless, the thrust of each is representative: sex, violence, and shut-down.

I found myself most fascinated with trying to guess what Teddy was thinking and feeling. I imagined mostly bottled rage, but perhaps instead, relief at leaving it all behind. In a way Ruth's character was the most fascinating because she had only tangentially been exposed to the family by marrying into it. But by the end of the play, she had developed a complete, and for her, necessary response to her environment.

To the author of "My mind parasites must be dead", I hope that it had no resonance with you because your family life bore no resemblance to the play. For most of the rest of us, there was probably a lot too much of "oh, yeah", "unh-huh", "yep", "been there, done that", "that's just like my uncle/brother/dad/me." Painful but cathartic.

Max (Paul Rogers) is a surly pensioner who alternately venerates and vilifies his dead wife. Sam (Cyril Cusack), his brother, is a supercilious chauffeur. Lenny (Ian Holm) is a smiling, snake-like pimp. Joey (Terence Rigby) is a thick-witted, would-be boxer. These four men live together in a North London flat, the site of their perpetual sadomasochistic battle of words and sometimes physical violence. And then after nine years, Max's third son, Teddy (Michael Jayston), a philosophy professor living in California, comes back home for a visit. He brings his wife, Ruth (Vivien Merchant). She is immediately drawn in to the family's ugly psychological games and quickly proves a worthy opponent. Soon, the game involves both of Teddy's brothers taking extreme liberties with Ruth, as the coiled Teddy obstinately refuses to spoil the malicious fun by objecting.

At first the dialogue in Harold Pinter's play, little changed for this American Film Theatre production, seems arbitrarily elliptical and the characters' behavior perversely unmotivated, but the thing is so compelling that we realize there must be something more. There is a mad method to the characters' madness. The actors know what their characters are up to. Pinter knows what they're up to. They just don't hand us all the answers on a platter. Maybe Pinter is saying something about families and maybe he's saying something about women, but I think he simply created a set of very real characters and let them do their thing without bothering with a lot of explanations.

The director, Peter Hall, does a good job at staying out of the play's way. His camera does a few clumsy things that draw attention to itself, but mainly he gives the play the space to be what it is. This movie proves yet again that the confined space of a play can often be an advantage on the screen and doesn't necessarily need to be opened up.

Wiki article; "in The New Yorker, the critic John Lahr wrote, "'The Homecoming' changed my life. Before the play, I thought words were just vessels of meaning; after it, I saw them as weapons of defence."

Like many of Pinters stories the theme of power relationships is prominent. This movie disturbed and confused me in equal measure.

Firstly, there is no love between any of the characters in the family with the exception of Sam {Uncle}. They live in a big house but are all forced to live together and therefore interact.

Only one of the brothers Teddy has managed to become independent and move to America. An example of this constant threat level is when the farther Max tells his Brother Sam, that when he losses his job {becomes to old} he will be out on the street. There are also numerous loosely veiled threats made between Max {Farther} and his Son {Lenny}. Each protagonist has a long history of violence and probably murder. This is a household about to explode.

However, the arrival of Teddy and his wife {Ruth} add a new dynamic to this power struggle.

For me its easy to define the characters in the house but Ruth and Teddy motives are more disguised. Particularly Ruth, its ironic that Ruth is potentially being exploited the most {they are planning to make her a prostitute} the irony is that she has the most control in the house as she is able to show dominance mentally/verbally.

Reflecting, I think what scared me most was the cold rationality of the characters being almost devoid of emotion. In this household expressing emotion is weakness and weakness is dangerous to your mental and physical health.

Colin Wilson wrote of Mind Parasites that make people think things are wonderful when they are just dreadful tripe. The protagonists of his story manage to kill their Mind Parasites and are appalled to find out what a load of crap is being fobbed off on the world as high culture and intellectual experience. I don't mean this as a slight upon anyone who appreciates or finds interest and enjoyment in this film, I just can't see how it is possible to do so. And I really tried. I just ended up feeling confused and stupid.

I felt like I got the "joke" of this film in the first five minutes and then had to sit through nearly two hours of dreary repetition. Awful people babble at each other like brain damaged degenerates. This one is pointlessly vicious, that one tells aimless cruel anecdotes, and they all just behave irrationally at regular intervals, over and over. Ultimately it doesn't matter what happens because it's a roomful of lunatics being their own version of normal. The worst thing is I believe there really must be something there I am incapable of seeing, that I am missing something genuine that others see and I don't. I really tried to understand it, and asked my wife to explain it to me afterward. I am absolutely baffled by the fact that so many people can see so much depth in this thing when it seems to me to be so obviously, transparently, pointless irrationality for its own sake, that goes nowhere and has no reason to exist. I can't imagine writing such a thing and thinking I had done a good job, or reading such a thing and thinking it ought to be produced, or being able to act in such a thing without saying, "What on earth is this supposed to be about, and who would ever even sit through it?" It was only a few days ago that I came up with this dictum: Speak nonsense with a straight face if you wish to be thought profound. It is my opinion that The Homecoming is an example of this principle in action. I envy anyone who is able to watch this without feeling robbed of two hours of their lives.

This is the most surreal experience you can ever have...by watching a square screen (or a rectangular one). Harold Pinter has written a work which takes the viewer on a nightmarish journey...yet all of the action takes place in a North London house...and also, inside your own head. There is underlying sexual tensions...underlying violence...underlying hatreds...and underlying psycho-sexual histories. The father Max is a sick mentally unstable ruler, who has no power. His son Lenny is a sick twisted pimp / thug. His other son Joey is a mentally challenged man who wants to become a boxer. His third son Teddy is visiting from the U.S.A. with his wife Ruth. Teddy is a Doctor of Philosophy...he is distant and he has almost no connection with his wife. Ruth is clearly mentally unhinged / unhappy and has no love at all for Teddy. Maxs brother Sam stays at the house. He is the one who is nearest to normality...but still light years away. Pinter has created six characters who are impossible to like, and impossible to relate to. The complex interactions which happen during the running time of 111 minutes...may transfix you, disturb you-- even make you question your faith in any form of humanity. It is an astonishingly powerful piece of work. It was first performed as a play in 1965. This film version was made in 1973. Since then academics have wrestled with the question...whats it all about?? My own view is that this is a real classic, and requires several views to get near what Pinter was telling us. Perhaps he was telling us...human relationships are always complex...and often the complexity is unfathomable.

The only comments are 1. The previous comment states that Cyril Cusak is the impotent father but Paul Rogers plays that role and 2. A character "Brian" played by a then 8 year old actor Jonathan Sachar, is shown as a member of the cast but does not appear in the 1973 adaptation. In any event the adaptation is brilliant and the photographer brings the play from the stage to the screen with his own brilliance. The performances are outstanding with Rogers dominating the screen as the bullying yet pathetic father, and Ian Holm, truly detestable as the hateful son. Finally the dialogue is as sharp and cutting as one would expect from Harold Pinter