The Dead

The Dead

John Huston

Lionsgate

James Joyce’s short story “The Dead” is a com­pact beauty, the final — and best, I think — story in his col­lec­tion Dubliners. The events of the story take place dur­ing and just after a gath­er­ing on the evening of the Feast of the Epiphany (January 6) in 1904 Dublin, at the home of two spin­ster sis­ters; any­one who has read the story will cer­tainly remem­ber the final sen­tences, in which the cen­tral char­ac­ter, Gabriel Conroy, expe­ri­ences his own epiphany as his wife, Gretta, describes her first love as a young girl in Galway. The film critic Pauline Kael described John Huston (age eighty, and suf­fer­ing from emphy­sema) direct­ing his film ver­sion of The Dead “from a wheel­chair, jump­ing up to look through the cam­era, with oxy­gen tubes trail­ing from his nose to a portable gen­er­a­tor.” The Dead (Lionsgate) was released in the­atres in 1987, just a short time after Huston’s death. I first saw it then, and twenty-two years later could still recall a moment near the end of the film, as Donal McCann (play­ing Gabriel) looks up at Gretta (played by Huston’s daugh­ter, Anjelica), who has paused on a stair­case in mid-descent. She is caught up in the mem­o­ries evoked by a piece of music heard faintly from the other room, and he finds him­self deeply moved by some­thing in her expres­sion. Huston extends that word­less moment so that it becomes the silent heart of the entire quiet film, and we, too, are wholly caught up in it. The film was not released on dvd until November 2009. It was — and is — a wor­thy cap­stone to Huston’s career of nearly fifty years.