Review: John Huston’s Adaptation of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ on Criterion 4K UHD Blu-ray

Rare is the case when an artist knows a particular work will be their last, but when an emphysema-stricken, 80-year-old John Huston unquestionably knew his time was short, he ensured his final production would be his most personal. Huston, who had adapted various works of literature ranging from hardboiled detective novels to Herman Melville’s magnum opus, at last turned his attention to his favorite author, James Joyce, and the Irish writer’s most beloved short story, “The Dead.” To make this even more of a passion project, the director had his son, Tony, write the screenplay and cast his daughter, Anjelica, as the story’s central character, Gretta.

Consistent with the short story, the first two-thirds of the film are spent at a party that Gretta and her husband, Gabriel (Donal McCann), attend for the Feast of Epiphany, the celebration in early January that marks the end Christmas festivities in Ireland, while the final act takes place at the couple’s hotel room. And just as it was in the story, it isn’t until the very end that the material’s preoccupation with mortality is ultimately revealed. Death in Joyce’s work is typically approached through the elaborate social and religious customs that surround it, but here the topic is gently evoked as the shadow lurking behind even the most benign nostalgia.

That somber undercurrent informs even the opening conviviality, foregrounding the melancholy that undergirds Yuletide celebrations and year-end reflection. Amid dancing, music recitals, and plenty of drink, there are also moments of solemnity, like a reading of the 8th-century Irish poem “Donal Og,” a keening lament to lost love that the guests listen to in rapt silence.

Amid the general gaiety are also discussions of politics, all laced with questions of Irish independence voiced with various degrees of seriousness. When a nationalist asks Gabriel why he wishes to travel abroad to France and Belgium rather than stay in his homeland, his reply that he wants to “keep up with the languages” only invites the woman’s further scrutiny of him not working on his own, colonially repressed tongue. Republicanism threads among the other, lighter topics of conversation, ultimately mingling into the larger tapestry of nostalgia that can lead discussions from arguments about the pope or mentions of Ireland’s disgraced home rule champion Charles Parnell to reveries about the best opera singers that guests have seen.

Few directors known for their literary adaptations so consistently homed in on the descriptive language of their chosen texts as a guide for the films’ look as Huston did. Not unlike the oily, desaturated look of his 1956 adaptation of Moby Dick that seems to spring fully from Melville’s early description of a painting hanging in a dingy seaside tavern, The Dead roots its cinematography in Joyce’s recurring use of brown as symbolic of death.

For Joyce, brown was the color of coffins, church pews, and studies filled with oxidizing papers, and Huston and DP Fred Murphy cast the interiors of the Dublin manor where the party occurs in the dim, burnt yellows of oil lamps that accentuate the dark tones of wood paneling and some of the women’s dresses. In his final film, Huston adopts a camera style never seen in his earlier work, defined by floating, impressionistic camerawork that evokes a simultaneously inviting and suffocating intimacy that’s remarkably redolent of the work of Terence Davies.

All the subtle moments of awkwardness, tension, and conflict of the party elegantly tee up the story’s closing segment, in which Gabriel and Gretta return to their hotel room and Gretta gives in to a sudden flood of memories of her first love, a young Galway boy who died of cold from standing outside trying to woo her when they were teens. In a rush, the film’s tacit, circumspect approach to mortality becomes explicit, and the camera remains in fixed positions to study both the repressed anguish pouring out of Gretta and the shock that Gabriel feels at seeing his wife express such open emotion about anyone, let alone another man.

In the final minutes, the camera leaves the characters to roam over a snow-covered Ireland as Gabriel muses in voiceover about recognizing in the dead lover’s story what true, unconditional devotion looks like and that he has never himself felt it for another person. Confronted with something infinite and intangible, Gabriel copes by refocusing his mind on the same small details that define the film, thinking of the snow currently falling on all the living and the dead.

Image/Sound

The Dead’s naturalistically lit, drably colored interiors are rendered flawlessly in the new 4K digital restoration. The 2009 Lionsgate DVD release brightened its transfer a shade to overcome the low-light limitations of the format, but Criterion’s new transfer returns the image to its accurate, darker state even as it displays a significant boost in clarity. The worn textures of old furniture wood and fabric is easy to make out, as are the range of green, brown, and cream shades of walls and costumes. There are no signs of over-compression, and grain distribution is stable throughout the presentation. The soundtrack is an understated blend of dialogue and gentle noise of a sedate house party, and its spare elements are well mixed across all channels.

Extras

The major extra here is a 2K-restored transfer of Lilyan Sievernich’s behind-the-scenes documentary John Huston and the Dubliners. Sievernich, married to one of the film’s producers, shows Huston, a legendarily irascible, Hemingwayesque figure, rendered gentle by illness and his devotion to the material and Ireland. Huston always spoke with a practiced, clear diction, but he slows his speech even further between breaths on an oxygen tank, never raising his voice and striking a delicate balance between arranging every element just so while inviting the choices and insights of the actors and crew. His generous, placating energy seemed to pervade the production; Sievernich also captures scenes between actors talking between takes that are suffused with warmth. The unspoken but unmissable knowledge that Huston was making his final work, combined with the collaboration of his screenwriter son and star daughter, at times mirrors the painful but humane intimacy of The Dead itself.

In a new interview, Irish author Colum McCann discusses his love of both the short story and film. He marvels that the film retains almost the whole of James Joyce’s prose, while emphasizing certain elements through Tony Huston’s minor variations on the text and Huston’s elegant direction. McCann even takes time to gush over the specific accuracy of Anjelica’s Galway accent. Excerpts of Anjelica Huston reading her 2014 memoir offer her intimate memories of her father’s passion for the story, how many of the director’s long-time collaborators all returned for one last job for him, and how she used the production as a chance to spend time with her ailing dad. A booklet essay by critic Michael Koresky places the film in the context Huston’s career before calling attention to the lyricism of his direction and its mimicry of the same circumspect yet suggestive depth of character that typifies Joyce’s story.

Overall

One of the finest literary adaptations and artistic swan songs ever made, John Huston’s The Dead receives a transfer worthy of the film’s understated yet precisely intentioned beauty.