The Dead
John Huston (1987)
A group of Dubliners, friends and family, gather in January 1904 for their annual Epiphany party. They sing and dance, eat and drink, remember the past. At the end of the evening, just before Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) and his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston) leave the gathering, she hears another of the guests, Bartell D’Arcy (Frank Patterson), singing ‘The Lass of Aughrim’ in a beautiful tenor voice. Silent on the journey back to their hotel and then distressed, she tells her husband that the song has stirred up painful memories of her teenage sweetheart, a boy called Michael Furey, who died, Gretta feels, because of her. In the interior monologue that ends the film, Gabriel admits that his wife’s first love was more powerful than her feelings for him or his for her – or for anyone else in Gabriel’s life. His thoughts turn to death. He pictures it spreading over all Ireland like a hushing, thickening blanket of snow. The Dead develops in such a way that Gabriel’s grave, poetic thoughts form a perfectly apt conclusion: snow has been falling lightly throughout and the mood has darkened, nearly imperceptibly yet powerfully.
The film’s final image, which visualises Gabriel’s bleak, steadily spoken words, feels remarkably serene, almost sheltering (a reminder of the idea that, in their last moments, people freezing to death become warm again). The fact that John Huston died shortly after completing The Dead (and before its release) makes it hard to dissociate the theme of the movie from the man who made it. Huston’s direction is effortlessly sure and unobtrusive: it’s as if he’s reached a kind of film-making nirvana and is silently, gracefully taking leave of cinema. His son Tony wrote this screen adaptation of James Joyce’s short story (from the Dubliners collection) and his daughter has a leading role: this gives an extra layer to the sense of completeness, makes you feel that their father is leaving the medium in good hands. The proudly tough-minded John Huston would likely have derided this fanciful interpretation of his work but perhaps it’s fair at least to say that this fine film’s level-headed apprehension of death is informed by its director’s point of view. The cast also includes, among others, Cathleen Delany, Helena Carroll, Marie Kean, Donal Donnelly, Colm Meaney and Dan O’Herlihy.
[1990s]