MOVIE REVIEW : A Touching ‘Da’ Uses Denial, Humor as Weapons Against Grief

Charlie: Tell me, what was it like?

Da: What?

Charlie: Dying.

Da: Ah, I didn’t care for it.

--From Hugh Leonard’s “Da”

Death is irreversible, so we often strive mightily to erect barriers against it. We deny it, explain it, mythologize it--anything to soften its finality.

In “Da” (Royal), a very fine and touching film that’s been made from Hugh Leonard’s play, denial and humor become weapons against grief. A New York-based playwright, Charlie Tynan (Martin Sheen), battles against the guilt and sorrow he feels during and after the funeral of his adoptive father, his Da (Barnard Hughes), by remembering him--summoning him back as a eccentric old buttinsky dogging his heels around the family house, a worrisome old codger as maddening, opinionated and stubborn in death as he was in life.

As Tynan recalls the past--bringing back his entire family, including himself at several ages--he staves off pain by defensive sarcasm. The greatest friction is between Charlie and himself as a young man (Karl Hayden). They snarl and snap at each other with the indecent vigor of lively mongrels. It’s clear that self-indictment is at the spine of the story: Charlie’s guilt at leaving (betraying?) his adoptive family, conquering new horizons and new cities--where the family couldn’t or wouldn’t join him.

When the sentiment does come, it’s in off-key moments or sudden rushes, though Leonard has added, for this version, a long, heart-clutching sequence about the attempted drowning of the family dog--the unlucky canine attacker of local nuns and priests--which reaches Dickensian climaxes of emotional frenzy.

The core of the film is Barnard Hughes’ Da--one of the most justly celebrated and awarded stage performances of the last decade. If this film did nothing more than preserve Hughes’ work, it would be fully justified. This is great acting that doesn’t advertise itself, doesn’t strut. There are no bravura moments, no fiery emotional cadenzas. Even when Da throws his second-act temper tantrum over an ancient romantic rival, there’s something soft and sad about his anger, shame-faced and infinitely vulnerable.

Since Da is remembered and purified, there’s an interesting absence of spontaneity some of the time. He repeats old routines, now precious in Charlie’s memory--leaping with pain from a hot teapot, searching for a pipe, bemusedly berating the dog--and Hughes seems to play much of the role as a man without too much conscious thought, settled as a shoe. It’s a performance where the passion is buried deep inside--which is why it works so well against Sheen’s passionate, fine-nerved work as Charlie: a man covering hypersensitivity by quiet ridicule, fighting buried tears by indulging in savage jests.

Da is a gentle, gruff man whose patriarchal pose is a sham. He’s spent his life tending roses, his family and the local prejudices with equal care. He loves the prettiness of his wife’s cheek, the ruddy earth, the spectacular bay. He’s no adventurer; it’s a nice irony that his unsuccessful rival was a sailor. He’s a man as rooted as the greenery he tends, one who, as Charlie remarks, would rather settle down in the brambles than take a chance of losing his seat.

It takes great discipline and heart for an actor to play this simple a person--to reveal the radiance of the seemingly unexceptional--and that’s what Hughes does here. He doesn’t make Da more than he should be, doesn’t give him the Barrymore bravura that Ian Bannen (justifiably) gave another patriarch in “Hope and Glory.” Hughes is playing not just a man, but a distillation of a man. By showing Da’s finer qualities--his generosity, perseverance and humor--for exactly what they are, he immortalizes them.

There’s a third superb performer in the movie: William Hickey as Mr. Drumm. Hickey’s Drumm is, in a way, the surrogate father, Charlie’s first employer, offering scathing chitchat and icy lore. And Hickey makes him a character worthy of Dickens or Joyce: a man brittle as cornstalks, dry and gray as tweed, slow and remorseless as a glacier. His words seem to rasp on the air, lacerating contempt curling out through the cracks in his sentences.

“Da” is a first-class actor’s show. The range and shading of these three performances, along with Doreen Hepburn’s excellent work as the mother, keep it in balance. The director, Matt Clark, making his first film, is better known as an actor--his best work may have been as the decent, torn farm-loan agent in “Country”--and you can tell that stimulating his actors and enhancing their work are his chief concerns. He helps three of his colleagues--Hughes, Sheen and Hickey--reach or reveal the top of their form, and he and his colleagues give the work an admirably smooth finish, easily and lucidly traversing all its levels of reverie, fantasy and reality.

“Da” (MPAA rated: PG) opens and closes on glassily pretty floral images, but though the production and cinematography have a certain high gloss, we can always sense a heart beating underneath. The film takes a tricky, seemingly offhand approach to one of the touchiest of all subjects--the feelings of guilt, grief or loss awakened by the death of a parent--and by playing against the obvious, and searching out the true, makes its story laugh and sing. The film, at its best--and Barnard Hughes, always--reawakens, to all our benefit, a feeling of honest connection and sympathy between parents and children, the living and the dead.