You don’t have to get old to truly appreciate John Huston’s elegiac ode to Belle Epoque Ireland and his farewell to the cinema.
Wintry, wistful, funereal and poetic, James Joyce’s “The Dead” becomes a simple, short and beautiful postcard from the past in Huston’s hands.
Others have attempted to adapt Joyce, but only a literary-minded cinematic craftsman such as Huston seemed to have the touch, the patience and the sympathies to make Joyce “play” on the screen. A high living bon vivant and Renaissance Man, Huston moved to Ireland in the ’50s, became an Irish citizen in the ’60s and seemed to relish and “get” the place and its most esteemed writer.
What lingers from the first time I saw this film was its stillness, the quiet world these sympathetically and sharply drawn characters gathered for a Dublin dinner party on a snowy January night in 1904. So little happens that sticks in the memory that I’ve never given another thought to seeing it again.
But hearing Tilda Swinton quote from the Joyce short story and Julianne Moore mention the movie, which the two great actresses are shown watching in Almodóvar’s attempt at a late career elegy, “The Room Next Door,” made me track it down to appreciate “The Dead” anew.
Spinster sisters Kate and Julie (Helena Carroll, Cathleen Delaney) and their niece Mary Jane (Ingrid Craigie) host an Epiphany dinner gathering of family and friends in their upper class Dublin townhouse on this winter’s night.
The sisters were music teachers, which their niece is now. Students, family members and minor luminaries will join them for roast goose, port, entertainment and conversation.
It’s a traditional gathering of long-standing — formal wear and dancing, singing and recitations, artistic debate, and political debate narrowly averted — wrapped in the informality of family and old fashioned Irish hospitality.
Mrs. Malins (Marie Kean) has come “home” from Edinburgh to check on her alcoholic son Freddy (Donal Donnelly), who’s “taken the pledge,” according to family friend, Mr. Brown (the grand character actor Dan O’Herlihy). When Freddy’s late, they all know why.
Not to worry. When Gabriel (Donal McCann) and his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston) show up, he’ll take care that Freddy is kept presentable and manageable for the night. Gabriel is an Irish columnist for a British newspaper, but still frets over the annual “speech,” a sort of light-hearted benediction, that he delivers at these gatherings. Gretta bears a hidden burden underneath the gay appearance — Her husband insists she wear “galoshes,” can you imagine? — she affects.
Over the course of the evening, Gabriel will have his “West Briton” (pro-English) sentiments challenged, the great opera singers of the past and present will be compared and debated, with the tenor Mr. D’Arcy (Frank Patterson) weighing in and even singing. The venerable Mr. Grace (Sean McClory) will give a recitation of a “Broken Vow,” Freddy will be in his cups and emboldened to compare a “Negro tenor” at “the panto”to the tenors others are endorsing — Caruso among them.
It’s an evening of reminiscenes of “the dead” and an embrace of the “living,” a sentimental pause before the Great War and the politics of dissent and the rise of “The Troubles” to come. And it’s just as lovely, warm and comforting as can be.
Joyce, Tony Huston (who adapted the story) and John Huston give us only a glimpse of the backward, impoverished Ireland outside these doors — Gabriel’s mention of how “sick” he is of his country, that he takes his cycling tour vacations on The Continent just to get away from it.
One feels the Huston children and Irish cast are indulging old man John’s rose-colored fantasy of being an Irish squireen in this picture. The writer, director, traveler, adventurer bought and kept a great house — St. Clerans– and treated it as a salon, holding forth on occasions not unlike this one.
The cast is near perfect, from the little-known Irish actors who got their greatest Hollywood exposure to expat “Hollywood Irish” O’Herlihy, in grand form that would set him up for a memorable “Twin Peaks” turn a few years hence.
Yes, that’s future “Hollywood Irish” mainstay Colm Meaney in a small role, underscoring Huston’s eye for talent and actors with promise. Meaney would become one of the most accomplished and constantly employed Irish actors of them all, bucking-up many an Irish indie film after his “The Snapper,” “The Commitments” and “The Van” Roddy Doyle trilogy breakthrough.
“The Dead” is short and one could almost say “slight,” not words you think of when you think of James Joyce. Nominated for two Oscars, it was greeted on arrival as a fine, sentimental farewell for John Huston.
But almost 40 years on, nobody’s bested this film as a Joyce adaptation. And this modest-budget classic remains the great cinematic tintype of Belle Epoque Ireland, with emotions and poetic affectations that are among its author’s best and which still beautifully apply to the old man who filmed it, even if he outlived the sentiments of its final lines.
“One by one, we’re all becoming shades. Better to pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age. “
Rating: PG, alcohol abuse
Cast: Anjelica Huston, Donal McCann, Helena Carroll, Cathleen Delaney, Kate O’Toole, Donal Donnelly, Frank Patterson, Dan O’Herlihy and Colm Meaney
Credits: Directed by John Huston, scripted by Tony Huston, based on a “Dubliners” story by James Joyce.
Running time:1:23
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