The Dead

Dublin, 1904. The Christmas dinner two elderly aunts give every year. The guests eat, sing and argue about politics. At the end of the night Gabriel sees his wife Gretta on the stairs, listening to a song, and back at the hotel she speaks of a boy who died in her youth. The whole evening changes meaning with that. John Huston directed, from the long story in James Joyce's Dubliners. His son Tony Huston wrote the screenplay and his daughter Anjelica plays Gretta. The conditions of the shoot are part of the film's story. Huston was eighty, tied to an oxygen tank because of emphysema, and directed from a wheelchair, often watching on a monitor in another room. He could not travel to Dublin; the interiors were built in California. He was not alive when the film opened; Huston died that August. The film is almost entirely conversation and a dinner table. The closing interior monologue about the snow is given with a fidelity rare in literary adaptation. Who it is for: readers of Joyce and viewers who like quiet, inward films. Who it is not for: anyone after incident; this is one dinner.