March 4, 1988 | Knowing John Huston died shortly after completing The Dead, knowing he was constantly aware of his own fading mortality as he framed every shot and choreographed every scene, might make you approach this exquisite film with a fair amount of melancholy dread.
It comes as a welcome surprise, therefore, to discover so much revivifying joy and pleasure throughout the first hour of The Dead. Huston and his scriptwriter son, Tony Huston, have faithfully adapted James Joyce’s classic story, and begin by beguiling us with shared intimacies. They bring us to a warmly festive dinner party in Dublin, circa January 1904, and invite us to share the hospitality of the elderly Kate and Julia Morkan and their niece, Mary Jane. We do so — warily at first, but willingly.
Gabriel Conroy, the favorite nephew of the maiden Morkan sisters, is the evening’s unofficial host. A university professor and part-time literary critic, he sees himself as an outsider, at once part of the celebration and a distant observer. He’s bemused by the hapless efforts of the drunken Freddy Malins to appear sober for his long-suffering mother. And he’s annoyed by the spirited Irish patriotism of Molly Ivors, who playfully — or perhaps not so playfully — mocks Gabriel as ”a West Briton.” But only as the evening wears on does Gabriel drop his pose of objectivity, to praise the Irish people and their traditions.
Huston renders the evening in small increments of revealing detail: The pained look in the eyes of Freddy’s mother. The unexpectedly rebellious edge to a servant girl’s voice. The slight but distinct exasperation of Gabriel’s wife, Gretta, as she describes her husband’s insistence that she wear galoshes. The casual filling and refilling of a whiskey glass by Mr. Browne, whose steady inebriation is somewhat more dignified than Freddy’s. The anxiously furtive glances that Gabriel steals at his notes for a post-dinner speech.
Without ever pushing too hard or saying too much, Huston makes us aware of everything: pride, exuberance, polite small talk, slow-simmering resentment, a sense of time’s capacity to enhance memories and diminish abilities. The party takes place, appropriately enough, on the feast of the Epiphany. And for a while, Gabriel’s faith is restored by a sudden insight: Gatherings such as this one reveal the resilient humanity of the Irish people.
At least, that is the smugly facile notion Gabriel carries with him as he and Gretta take a hansom cab to the room where they will spend the night. Once they are alone, however, Gabriel must endure a rude shock: For all his talk of enduring traditions and transcendental concerns, he has never felt anything like the passion Gretta confesses for an innocent love from her past. She remembers the boy, long dead but still alive in a hidden corner of her soul.
The boy died, quite literally, of love for her.
Gabriel is immediately jealous — not of the long-ago lover, but of Gretta’s capacity to feel, and receive, such an emotion. Later, he muses: ”She had locked in her heart for so many years that image of her lover’s eyes when he had told her that he did not wish to live… I have never felt that way myself towards any woman, but I know such a feeling must be love.” Next to her, Gabriel suddenly feels very small indeed. And just as suddenly, we share the chill that envelops Gabriel like a shroud, or like the snow outside ”faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon the living and the dead.”
It’s tempting, and troubling, to read into Gabriel’s final soliloquy — taken almost verbatim from Joyce’s story — a final testament from John Huston.
Near the end of his life, did the great filmmaker look back at his work and find it wanting? Did he somehow figure his worth as insignificant when compared with the grander passions, the more glorious achievements, of other artists?
Perhaps. Or perhaps instead Huston saw in The Dead, a story he reportedly wanted to film for many years, a way of expressing the challenge facing any artist, the daunting task of achieving a kind of immortality through art. As Gabriel says: ”Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”
Maybe that’s what made Huston continue to work, and thrive, long after he had guaranteed his own immortality with films such as The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The African Queen and The Man Who Would Be King. He continued to move boldly, always trudging up some new mountain, defying the withering of age until the final fade-out.
The Dead draws you in slowly, delicately, through the understated eloquence of the writing, the sheer beauty of its imagery — praise to cinematographer Fred Murphy, production designers Stephen Grimes and Dennis Washington, costume designer Dorothy Jenkins — and the flawless performances of the superb ensemble cast. The film is a masterpiece, both a worthy translation of James Joyce’s story and a wonderful summation of John Huston’s career.
Donal McCann as the painfully self-aware Gabriel and Anjelica Huston, the director’s daughter, as the haunted Gretta are excellent. But, then again, so is everyone else: Helena Carroll as Aunt Kate, Cathleen Delany as Aunt Julia, Dan O’Herlihy as Mr. Browne, Donal Donnelly as Freddy Malins, Marie Kean as Mrs. Malins, and all the others. Most of the actors come from the Irish stage and are little known to American moviegoers. After you see them here, however, you will never forget them. And you will never forget The Dead.
