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Monday, December 25, 2017

THE DEAD (1987)

A stunning achievement. John Huston’s final flourish. In practice, nothing more than a long post-New Year’s dinner party (an hour’s worth of screen time), followed by a carriage ride to a hotel for married couple Donal McCann & Anjelica Huston (twenty minutes more). Yet carrying a charge sufficient to send out emotional ripples strong enough to change how you look at the world. Tony Huston’s script (undoubtedly with an able assist from father John), based on one of James Joyce’s DUBLINERS stories, does a miraculous job setting up about twenty dinner guests, and, with an Irish cast to die for & pitch-perfect production, give them just enough head to make the most of the small events, squabbles, foibles and moments of kindness, pity & affection we watch them live thru. You soon know them all, almost intimately, and forgive their faults. (A generous leave-taking blessed by an off-stage song from Frank Patterson’s high, unforced Irish tenor.) Then, over the long ride home, and during a remembrance/confession back at their hotel, the feeling that your world has been shaken by a stranger’s epiphany of long lost love. The film is a chamber piece that reverberates with the overtones of a great singer in a small room.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: Among the party entertainments (piano solo, poem, dramatic recitation), the most ancient of the spinster aunts sings a somewhat bowdlerized translation of Bellini’s Son Vergin Vezzosa from I PURITANI in the ruins of a voice. No doubt, Joyce knew a literal translation: (‘I’m a charming virgin in a wedding dress.’) might shock the guests.

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: Had Yasujirô Ozu been an Irishman (or set a story in early 1900s Dublin), it might have been this. Huston even uses interstitial ‘pillow’ shots between scenes like Ozu.

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