Okay, that's enough of the goofball so-bad-it's-good stuff. We all enjoyed taking a gander at bizarre foreign intrusions, both Mexican and Wookie, into the Christmas traditions in the form of Santa Claus and The Star Wars Holiday Special, but by the time I was done with those two, I needed a nice healthy dose of holiday melancholy to remind me that the festival season can be one of ineffable sadness as well as inexpressable joy. And nobody does ineffable sadness and inexpressable joy like the Irish, so I decided to get things back on the straight and narrow with John Huston's final film as a director, The Dead. Though it's not often thought of as a traditional holiday film, its action takes place on Epiphany, which in the Catholic calendar is the last of the Twelve Days of Christmas. And, considering how important the role of epiphany was in his writing, it's no surprise that this is based on a short story (from Dubliners) by the mighty James Joyce, who, like Huston, was an Irishman through and through despite his sometimes standoffish relationship with his homeland and its culture.
The Feast of Epiphany, like Christmas, is a time for family gatherings, for coming together and for realizing how important your friends and relations are in your life. Joyce needed little reminding of the subject; he lived most of his life in the long shadow of his family, for good and for ill. Likewise, John Huston -- literally deathly ill when he made The Dead, the third movie of his highly improbable but hugely successful late-stage comeback -- knew how important family was in his life. His own career as a successful actor and director had been predicted and preplanned by his father, Walter, and The Dead featured a fantastic screenplay by his own son Tony and a tremendous performance in the lead role by his daughter-in-law Anjelica. Like the characters in the story, Huston was surrounding himself, likely for the last time, with the people who loved him, and in the shadow of the people who made him, for one last realization, one last epiphany. The result is one of the smallest and quietest, but also one of the greatest, films of his career.
The action of The Dead, such as it is, revolves around a celebration of the Feast of Epihany in the company of Professor Gabriel Conroy (movingly played by Donal McCann, heading an almost all-Irish cast) and his wife Gretta (a stellar job by Anjelica Huston). The course of the evening's conversations -- and that's all there is to The Dead, conversation and memory and observation and realization -- will reveal a young love of Gretta's which has, through the course of her marriage and her entire life, lingered like an unquiet ghost between her and her husband. As they pass the hours at the home of Gabriel's aunts Julia and Kate, played with lovely grace and competence by Cathleen Delany and Helena Carroll, the professor will realize, in a stunning display of what the philosopher Richard Rorty calls the solidarity of irony, that he is capable of feeling intense affection and regret for someone he has never met, a long-dead rival for his wife's affections: and that because of that, he is capable of loving his wife all the more.
Joyce's work carries an emotional power that is often entirely internal -- its great revelations and transformations take place not in the world we can see, but in the much vaster world that exists inside our heads. The Dead is no exception, and presented John Huston with the challenge of showing us in a visual medium what is actually happening where no eyes can see; but he succeeds admirably by use of a deeply sensitive script and a more than capable cast. The Dead is filled with melancholy and even sadness, but in the purest spirit of the holidays, it's a sadness that binds, that brings together, that makes more human. In the rhythms of the Epiphany feast, in the stories told a thousand times, in the familiar songs sung, the predictable jokes laughed at, and the great sorrows of the past recalled, John Huston -- living out the very story he was filming -- reminded us of why shared unhappiness is just as vital as shared happiness: because it is shared. It is the snow that falls on the living and the dead alike.
12 DAYS OF CHRISTMAS RATING: A hearty Irish 11 pipers piping. If The Dead isn't a perfect holiday film, it's an intensely felt and enormously moving one, and one of the few that both fits into the mood and spirit of Christmas and is removed enough from it to be a film worth seeing at any time of year.
Related Posts:
The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: Bad Santa
The Screengrab's 12 Days of Christmas Marathon: The Nightmare Before Christmas
