On Criterion: The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

After the great Maggie Smith’s passing earlier this week, I wanted to re-watch The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Unable to find it on streaming, I settled for another of her classic roles: 1987’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne on Criterion, directed by Jack Clayton and based on the novel by Brian Moore (it’s available from NYRB Classics, though I haven’t read it). Maggie Smith gives a performance that would be Oscar bait in any year if it were an American movie.

Judith Hearne is a spinster—an avatar of wasted femininity and the embodiment of a dead end women are taught to fear. She was orphaned at a young age and raised by a domineering, guilt-tripping aunt who, it’s implied, gave her very little freedom to pursue interests of her own. Though her aunt was rich, the only things that have passed down to Judith are refined manners, one evening gown, and some fancy jewelry. Judith makes a meager living in Dublin as a piano teacher and lives in a downmarket boarding house run by a nosy, passive-aggressive landlady. Also in the house is the landlady’s boorish, mooching son—a poet who describes his free room and board as an investment in the immortality his epic masterwork is sure to grant him.

Judith gets a love interest: the landlady’s brother, Mr. Madden, recently returned from New York City and thoroughly Americanized. For Judith, America is impossibly romantic, and she falls in love with Mr. Madden (played by Bob Hoskins, who would star in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? the following year). It soon ends in disappointment, however: the American sees Judith’s inherited jewels and imagines she’s sitting on substantial wealth; he pursues her with the aim of using her money to open an American-style hamburger and hot dog restaurant in Dublin. When she learns the truth, she’s humiliated and slips into alcoholism—something we learn has plagued her for a long time. She tries to find solace in religion and fails; this leads to a serious crisis of faith.

Life was unkind, until recent decades, to women who failed to marry and did not have family or wealth to fall back on. A life of dependence comes with many humiliations. Women like Judith Hearne are figures of schadenfreude for many men of the online right, who openly fantasize about the future misery of today’s girlbosses (or any woman who values her own autonomy). But for Judith, it wasn’t girlbossing that led to her loneliness: it was decades of self-sacrifice to someone who gave her nothing in return and a religious imperative to subsume her own desires in hope of a reward in the afterlife. We see her love interest, Mr. Madden, casually rape the 16-year-old housemaid—a clue about whether Judith can really be saved by a man. Fewer women now need become Judith Hearnes.

I found the movie a bit shallow and heavy-handed. Judith is so abject, so pathetic, and so easily manipulated by those around her that her suffering begins to lose its moral force. She’s saved from cartoonishness by a sensitive performance from Maggie Smith, whose face can crumple in about twenty different directions and whose eyes are always suggesting things unspoken. Sadly, we’re only permitted a brief glimpse of her comic skills: hospitalized, a visitor tells Judith she should socialize with the other patients. Her reply, after a perfectly timed delay: “Why?”

The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne is worth watching, but probably no one’s favorite Maggie Smith performance. I’ll hold out for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.