SANTA BARBARA INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 REVIEW! That They May Face the Rising Sun is adapted from the beloved Irish novel of the same name by John McGahem. It is set in rural Ireland in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It depicts a year in a small town when the home of writer Joe Ruttledge (Barry Ward) and his wife and artist Kate (Anna Bederke) became a focal point for the community.
News is delivered in person as the men and women of the town wander through and sit for a drink or smoke. We’re introduced to an older couple, Jamesie (Phillip Dolan) and Mary Murphy (Ruth McCabe). Jamesie’s brother, Johnny (Sean McGinley), has taken a job in England but returns for visits and wonders about returning to the countryside. Prickly older local handyman Patrick (Lalor Roddy) isn’t shy about telling Johnny he’s ruined his life by going away.  Meanwhile, Kate is facing a decision. Her partner in an art dealership in England is moving on, so Kate has to decide whether to take over the business, which will mean leaving their idyllic country life behind. Joe is working on his next novel, so he isn’t eager to leave.
There’s not a lot of drama in That They May Face the Rising Sun — all the magic is in the conversations, the lovingly drawn and acted characters, and the insightful portrait of small-town life. I have not read the novel, so I can’t comment on the faithfulness of the adaptation. But the movie never feels slow, largely thanks to the choices made by the director, Pat Collins. He concentrates on scenes that reveal character economically without being showy or obvious. It just seems like you’re a fly on the wall in an authentic rural Irish town of the period. But layer by layer, you start to get insight into the characters and come to care for them. Imagine The Banshees of Inisherin, only without the absurdity. That makes a pretty different motion picture, but one that seems more realistic and less like an acting exercise.

“Joe is working on his next novel, so he isn’t eager to leave.”
In fact, the acting is the other part of the equation that is the secret to its success. It gives you some idea of the director’s commitment to authenticity to find out the production briefly considered going with locals who had never acted before. Instead, they mostly went with acting veterans, and it paid off. The seemingly central characters of Joe and Kate are not from the town, so they are almost proxies for the audience. The real action is in the trio of the older Irish men of Jamesie, Johnny, and Patrick, played by Phillip Dolan, Sean McGinley, and Lalor Roddy. Of the three, Phillip Dolan had never acted before but was selected because he was suitable for the character. It says a lot that he can hold his own with McGinley and Roddy, who are real pros.
My one real criticism of That They May Face the Rising Sun is that the women in the story are incredibly poorly fleshed out compared to the men. One could argue that the wives only act as obstacles to the husbands, whether it is Mary not wanting Johnny to come to live with her and Jamesie or Kate pondering a return to England. Compare this to the men, whose struggles, both serious, insignificant, and petty, are examined with great precision. I don’t know if this is a limitation of the source material, and indeed, one can blame the time period a bit, but this is a modern made flicker.
Overall, That They May Face the Rising Sun is solid and worth your time. The acting is top-notch, and the story is compelling, but its verisimilitude is truly off the charts. This is the closest you can get to a time machine to take you to a bygone time and place that is little celebrated but worth remembering.
That They May Face the Rising Sun screened at the 2024 Santa Barbara International Film Festival.