JOHN Huston’s The Dead (1987) is one of his most beautiful and haunting films. Based on the 1914 James Joyce short story of the same name, it was made in the last year of Huston’s rich life. Although he was frail, Huston succeeded in capturing the uniqueness and power of Joyce’s elegant, deeply poetic short story. Like the best movies, it stays in your mind long after you have viewed it.
At just one hour and 23 minutes, The Dead is short by movie standards. Yet like the great Joyce story, it packs a lot of content into a tiny frame. The action takes place at a dinner party on the Feast of the Epiphany in 1904 Dublin. An annual tradition, the party is given by the spinster Morkan sisters in their rented flat above the corn-factor’s. The guests include family, friends, and the musically inclined acquaintances they have gained over the years performing and giving music lessons. Among their favoured guests is their dear nephew, Gabriel Conroy, who comes into the city each year to attend the party with his wife, Gretta.
The film is shot almost in real time. We see the guests arrive, introduce each other, pour themselves drinks, dance, and listen to music. There are stories, gossip, a recitation, and a toast. The evening culminates with a dinner of roast goose. The Morkan sisters provide their appreciative guests with food and drink that is both simple and extravagant. Huston takes his time in presenting the meal, allowing his viewers to enjoy vicariously the feast. We see the guests pass through each course, selecting food and drink that suit their tastes. At the conclusion of the meal, they express their thanks and take their leave, heading into the snow for the cold journey home.
One wonders how such a simple movie came to be made. Were it not based on a celebrated short story and in the hands of a famous director, perhaps it would not have been. Yet it is precisely in its simplicity that Huston is able to play with one of the weightiest themes of art itself: namely the difference between the aesthetic and the moral life. The Dead calls into question the difference between beauty and its source and posits the danger of divorcing the two. For Gabriel Conroy, surely a stand-in for both Joyce and Huston, it takes a mysterious song, and a woman frozen on a staircase, to reveal this difference.
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The party is composed of a variety of distinctive characters, whom Huston efficiently conjures by his direction and the tight screenplay of his son, Tony Huston. There is Freddy Malins, the harmless but incurable drunk, a constant worry to his hostesses and his pious but overbearing mother. There is the silver fox, Mr Browne, the lone Protestant at the gathering, whose veneer of sophistication fades the more drinks he has. Also in attendance is Bartell d’Arcy, a celebrated tenor who declines to sing on account of a sore throat. There is Molly Ivors, an attractive young republican, who leaves the party early to attend a political event. Receiving each guest is the nervous maid, Lily, recently come of age and wary of the ‘palaver’ of young men. Finally, there are the elderly hostesses themselves: Aunt Kate, the more vigorous and assertive of the sisters, and Aunt Julia, whose innocence and kindness surpass her hearing and understanding.
Of all the characters present at the party, it is Gabriel, played by Donal McCann, whose point of view brings cohesion to the story. Gabriel is a teacher by profession but writes anonymous literary reviews in an English-affiliated newspaper. Gabriel is both charmed and annoyed by his doting aunts. A man of cosmopolitan tastes, Gabriel is current with the trends of the Continent, even getting his wife to wear a pair of newly invented galoshes. Gabriel is deeply attached to Gretta, masterfully portrayed by the director’s daughter, Anjelica Huston. She, in turn, is clearly devoted to her husband, whom she respects, but not so much that she can’t make playful fun of him with his aunts.
With Huston’s direction and the fine portrayal by McCann, we can perceive in Gabriel a sense of unease which stands in contrast to the jollity of the party. There are several causes of his anxiety. Most obviously is the speech he must deliver at the end of the meal. Throughout the evening, we see him steal furtive glances at a folded piece of paper he keeps tucked in his pocket. Beyond that, Gabriel must play the role of factotum to his aunts. To him is given the tasks of keeping an eye on Freddy, carving the goose, and helping Mrs Malins get a cab. He is quick-witted, affable, and entirely dependable. But one gets the sense that he is unable fully to enjoy the festive occasion.
We get a deeper view into Gabriel’s situation via his encounter with the pretty Miss Ivors. As he scans the roomful of guests upon his arrival, Miss Ivors greets him with a mysterious wink. The significance of this gesture is unclear until later in the party when his Aunt Kate pairs them on the dance floor. While they dance a quadrille, Miss Ivors boasts of uncovering Gabriel’s secret: he is the anonymous ‘G C’ who writes reviews in an English journal, a mark of shame in the eyes of the young republican. She mocks him as a ‘West Briton’, an Irishman who prefers the culture and ways of England. Still, Miss Ivors invites him and his wife to join her in Galway for the summer. Gabriel demurs. He has planned a bicycle tour of the continent with friends. ‘And what of your own country,’ Miss Ivors prods him. ‘I’m sick to death of my own country,’ Gabriel bursts out.
This is a revealing scene, showing Gabriel’s conflicted feelings about his home. He protests innocence to Miss Ivors about his attitude towards Ireland, but his embarrassment betrays some level of guilt. When his wife asks him what he and Miss Ivors were arguing about, he gets even more upset. ‘We were not arguing. Did she tell you that?’ Whatever Gabriel’s irritation signifies, the similarity to the author is striking. Joyce left Dublin for Europe in 1904, eventually settling in Trieste and Paris but continuing to write about life in Ireland.
Equally revealing is the toast that Gabriel gives to the hostesses of the party, his Aunts Kate and Julia and their niece, Mary Jane. The speech is warm, witty, and elegantly phrased. It pleases everyone and brings tears to the eyes of the hostesses. On the surface the speech is a big success and surely a relief to Gabriel, who had been fretting about it all evening. Yet it also betrays disquiet within his soul. The speech is an encomium to the hospitality of the hostesses, which he calls so welcome in a ‘sceptical and thought-tormented world’. But it extends that praise to the hospitality of Ireland herself, for which Gabriel is grateful but ready to escape. He lovingly teases his aunts, describing himself and the other guests as the ‘victims’ of their hospitality. While everyone laughs, one wonders how much truth is contained in his joke.
Gabriel’s speech does not simply praise his hostesses’ virtues. It also offers a bit of a sermon to his fellow guests. In a sombre tone, he notes that on occasions such as this, ‘sadder thoughts’ should occur. These thoughts, of the ‘past, youth, changes – perhaps friends we miss here tonight’, must not overwhelm us, he says. We must not turn to brooding or ‘gloomy moralising’. ‘Our work,’ he declaims, ‘is among the living’ to whom we have real ‘duties and affections’. As Gabriel remonstrates with the table, Huston’s camera tracks the faces of the diners, who attentively await the direction of his speech. Happily, he returns to praising his aunts and their niece who have created such a warm atmosphere, which Gabriel calls the ‘true spirit of camaraderie’.
Gabriel’s sermonising seems a bit unprovoked. It is true that throughout the evening people and events of the past have been recalled in conversation: the ‘late lamented’ Patrick Morkan, Gabriel’s grandfather and the family patriarch; the tragic soprano, Georgina Burns, who died of tuberculosis at a tender age; the English tenor, Parkinson, about whom Aunt Kate rhapsodises as the greatest singer she ever heard, though scarcely anyone else remembers him. It is natural that on an occasion such as this one, the mind of a reveller should turn to the memory of loved ones no longer present. But the exhortation to the guests to train their ‘strenuous endeavours’ to the living is conspicuous. More than anything, it appears spoken to himself, a man haunted by the past, afraid of the future, and unable to enjoy what should be a joyous occasion.
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At the conclusion of the party, Gabriel is charged with helping Mrs Malins and her son make their way into a cab for the journey home. While Freddy – no more nor less drunk than when he arrived – hails a horse-drawn carriage, Gabriel gently wakes up Mr Browne, who has fallen asleep in the coat closet. To his mother’s great annoyance, the kind-hearted Freddy offers to take Mr Browne home. While Lily the maid helps Gabriel with his galoshes, a sweet tenor voice is heard from upstairs. Gabriel looks up the staircase to see his wife transfixed. Gabriel is mesmerised, more so by the rapt attention of his wife than by the song itself. He says nothing but watches his wife, who listens intently, with an expression of sadness but the faintest hint of a smile. When the song ends, she jerks her head as if awakened from a dream. Suddenly aware of her husband, she descends the staircase without saying a word.
In such a delicate and subtle movie, this is the turning point. Together Huston and his daughter capture in an understated but supremely confident way the beauty and significance Joyce conveys in his short story. As Gabriel looks up to his wife, she too looks up, straining to hear the song emanating from the room above. A simple stained-glass window frames Gretta, whose head and shoulders are wrapped in a diaphanous white mantilla. Huston modifies her representation from Joyce’s short story but the effect is a powerful one. She resembles a woman praying in church. The only thing we hear is the voice of Bartell d’Arcy, who sings for the first time in the evening. D’Arcy’s voice is sweet and tender and the remaining guests react with profuse enthusiasm to his unexpected performance. Yet clearly the song has a different significance to them from its meaning to Gretta and her husband.
In Joyce’s short story, the song, The Lass of Aughrim, is cut off but here it is sung to completion. Among other things, this amplifies the beauty of the moment and keeps Gabriel, as well as the viewer, in suspense. What meaning does it have for Gretta? Is it simple aesthetic delight that arrests her or has the song called to mind a memory? What has made her so insensitive to the world around her, including her husband, who waits at the foot of the stairs? In his short story, Joyce describes the image of Gretta as an enigma to her husband.
‘There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. Her blue felt hat would show off the bronze of her hair against the darkness and the dark panels of her skirt would show off the light ones. Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter.’
Though the viewer of the movie is deprived of Gabriel’s inner monologue, Donal McCann evokes his simultaneous feelings of puzzlement, reverence and alarm.
In Joyce’s story, the vision of Gretta inspires in Gabriel a strong sexual desire. In the film, this longing is less apparent. We do get some sense of it when his wife coolly responds to his affections in the cab, and later in their hotel room. But more so we get a sense of the wide chasm he perceives between them. As their cab passes the snow-covered statue of King Billy, Gabriel seeks her attention with an amusing story of his grandfather and his silly horse, but Gretta is too distracted to appreciate it. Something has happened and Gabriel does not know what.
When the couple return to the hotel, the mystery is seemingly resolved. Gabriel asks his wife what she is thinking about, noting obtusely, ‘I think I know what the matter is. Do I know?’ Gretta answers without embarrassment that Bartell d’Arcy’s song reminded her of a boy she knew in her childhood. Michael Furey, a sickly, delicate boy who worked at the gasworks, used to sing The Lass of Aughrim when she lived with her grandmother. As Gabriel listens to her story, he cannot contain his jealousy. ‘So you are in love with him.’ He coldly speculates that Michael Furey is the reason why Gretta wants to vacation in Galway. Gretta responds with confusion. ‘Why? He’s dead.’
Strangely, this discovery hardly lessens the jealousy of Gabriel, who asks again whether she was in love with him. Gretta’s answer is ambiguous. ‘I was great with him at the time.’ When Gabriel inquires of the cause of his death, Gretta jumps with horror: ‘I think he died for me.’ Hereupon she recounts Michael’s coming to her grandmother’s house one cold winter night to declare his love. Because of his sickness, he had not been allowed to see her and she was shortly to leave for a convent in Dublin. Concerned for his health, Gretta sent the delirious young boy home. Only a few weeks after she arrived in Dublin, she received word that he had died. Having confessed her cruelty to her husband, she sinks into her pillow sobbing.
To be continued
