At Christmastide, friends gather for dancing, dinner and an evening’s entertainment. The party that forms the centrepiece of The Dead is convivial, but not celebratory. Palpable foreboding and regret haunts the dinner table, as guests reminisce on glories past, and worry about what the future has in store. John Huston capped his legendary career with this magnificent swansong. Directing literally from his sickbed, Huston creates one of the greatest final films, one that serves as a poignant acceptance of his impending demise, while still delivering a moving story of disparate souls finding common bonds of friendship and love.
The Dead is adapted from the final story of James Joyce’s anthology Dubliners, still considered an exemplar of the short story form. On 6th January 1904, elderly sisters Kate (Helena Carroll) and Julia (Cathleen Delaney) and their niece Mary Jane (Ingrid Craigie) host an Epiphany dinner for friends and Mary Jane’s music students in their Dublin home. Though the Epiphany celebrates an event from the beginning of the life of Christ, The Dead is all about the end of life. The guests arrive at the party with laughter and joy, but leave with sombre and solemn thoughts. Mary Jane’s young students are confronted by the older guests, with the elders serving as indicators of what lies ahead. Songs and poems about doomed romance underline the point. Huston was slowly succumbing to emphysema during production, and this reality informs The Dead’s philosophy: enjoy the party, but death is never too far away. Indeed, Huston would succumb to his illness months before the film’s premiere.
Among the guests at the party are Kate and Julia’s nephew Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann) and his wife Gretta (Anjelica Huston). Though dressed in their fineries, they too are confronted by regrets and aggravation. Gabriel is chided for his pretension and his perceived lack of nationalist sentiment, while Gretta is haunted by the recitations that stir up memories and long-brewing emotions. With his own end incoming, Huston sees no need to shy away from the thematic richness of Joyce’s work. He recreates Joyce’s effortless evocation of melancholy, touching on the author’s preoccupations with time, national identity, marital strife, and our eventual passing. Everyone is kind to friends and family members alike, but like most get-togethers, little resentments threaten to bubble up from beneath the fronts presented to others. Frustrations with family, state and God himself are vented as this roomful of artists makes their voices heard.
The bonds of family that resound in the story are reflected in the filmmakers too; Huston cast his daughter as the lead, and his son Tony adapted the short story for the screen. Given its brevity, it’s not surprising that The Dead doesn’t deviate from Joyce’s source material, committing to its ethos in narrative and tone. The party starts off joyfully, but by the end the guests are remembering happier times, with Gretta and Gabriel slinking back to their hotel in near silence, before a final sequence of confession that breaks the heart with its emotional intensity. The honesty of the depth of feeling in The Dead is breathtaking; no bitter irony or sarcasm to be found here. Everyone who comes to the party is revealed in their truest form come the end, as alcohol, good company and deep conversations lower their guards.
For Huston, there was no room or time for anything other than honesty. His impending demise drove him to make what many consider his greatest film (No mean feat on a C.V. that includes The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Maltese Falcon). The Dead’s potent emotionality, uniformly terrific performances, and sumptuous production invite the viewer to come in from the cold and spend time in a home filled with warmth and welcome. After a career defined by hard-boiled adventures, Huston went out with a tender and true masterpiece, imploring us to forgive, forget and forego as best we can. Much like the gifts given at the first Epiphany, The Dead knows that there is only one end, but it’s offered in a spirit of generosity, filled with riches all its own.
4K Ultra-HD Blu-ray Special Edition Features
- New 4K digital restoration, supervised and approved by director of photography Fred Murphy, with 4.0 surround DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack
- One 4K UHD disc of the film presented in Dolby Vision HDR and one Blu-ray with the film and special features
- New interview with author Colum McCann on the James Joyce short story and its adaptation for the film
- New 2K restoration of John Huston and the Dubliners (1987), a behind-the-scenes documentary by Lilyan Sievernich
- Audio excerpts from actor Anjelica Huston’s 2014 memoir, Watch Me
- English subtitles for the deaf and hard of hearing
- PLUS: An essay by author and film critic Michael Koresky and a 1987 piece by screenwriter Tony Huston about the making of the film
- New cover by Leanne Shapton
The Dead is available on Criterion 4k/Blu-ray dual edition now.
