The Dead: Another Year

John Huston’s deteriorating physical health made an Ireland shoot impossible, so interiors were filmed mostly on sets in Valencia, outside Los Angeles, with the exquisite exterior shots of snow-enshrouded Dublin taken by a second unit. The Dead stays mostly inside the Misses Morkans’ cheerful home, and the marvel of Huston’s film is how expansive he makes the place feel, and how much care and precision is given to Joyce’s many characters, of whom we learn only a little: the ever-soused Freddy Malins and his eternally disapproving mother; the haughty, mustachioed Mr. Brown; the withholding opera singer Mr. D’Arcy; the needling, politically minded Irish nationalist Miss Ivors, who gives Gabriel a piece of her mind for writing for that “English rag” the Daily Express. The rooms that these vivid people navigate are small and spare, yet the camera luxuriates through them, descending on cranes, moving on dollies, tracking behind objects to create depths of space.

Huston’s mercurial, varied style is hard to pin down, but his fascination with people’s idiosyncrasies and quirks, and the fluid, mobile way he captured them, is on striking display throughout The Dead. In one scene, Julia and Kate’s niece Mary Jane plays piano with impressive fury and precision, while the camera floats in rhythmic counterpoint, drifting behind the upright, gliding past a row of flickering candles in the foreground. In another, the camera sways among dancing revelers with a mix of curiosity and decorum. Later, when everyone has convened at the long dining-room table, the camera intently tracks a single plate as it’s passed from one pair of welcoming hands to the next and is piled with slices of goose and ham, a small dollop of stuffing, and a baked potato. The effect of all this subtle yet transfixing camera movement is a combination of intimacy and distance—the audience is invited to become one of the guests, yet there’s a ghostly omniscience keeping us at bay. A quiet foreshadowing is ushered into a film that relies on one of the greatest twists in all of literature: a tale of festivity revealed, with a tender sleight of hand, as a lament.

Huston beguilingly anticipates the film’s final turn during a scene in which Aunt Julia regales the crowd with a rendition of the epithalamium “Arrayed for the Bridal.” The irony of an elderly woman singing—sometimes squeaking—a song about young nuptial love surely isn’t lost on the guests, but rather than ridicule the woman’s effortful attempts to regain her youthful spirit, the film cuts away to a curious tracking shot creeping toward an empty staircase and beckoning the viewer upstairs, followed by multiple dissolves between shots of objects in Aunt Julia’s bedroom. As her singing slightly fades, as though heard from a lower floor, we see framed photographs, glass slippers, embroidered proverbs, rosary beads. Stylistically presaging the film’s closing moments, the sequence bridges the inherent schism within The Dead, which moves from the physical to the inchoate, by reminding us that we are all, always, surrounded by the past.

This feeling of lost time is particularly acute during the extended dinner-table scene, when, in a series of exchanges that borrow dialogue often verbatim from Joyce, the characters fall into rapture and reverie about opera singers they have loved. Talk of contemporary culture is fraught and tense (Freddy insists that a “Negro” singer he recently saw perform has “one of the finest tenor voices I’ve ever heard,” to the scoffing of Mr. Brown), while beloved figures from the past—long-dead sopranos and tenors—prove to be more palatable subjects. The mood, changing from the joy of the moment to the solemnity of some lost long-ago, leads to grimmer thoughts. Freddy’s mother mentions her son will be leaving for a recuperative retreat at a monastery where the monks sleep in their coffins. The table muses and speculates: Why would they do such a thing? Mrs. Malins puts the matter to rest: “To remind them of their last end.”

The party’s over, but there’s one more song. As Gabriel waits for Gretta by the front door, the mournful voice of Mr. D’Arcy wafts from above, serenading the remaining guests with the Irish folk ballad “The Lass of Aughrim.” Gretta stops cold while she descends the stairs, framed in majestic reverie against a multicolored stained-glass window, her head covered in a gossamer veil, a religious icon in the flesh. “The rain falls on my heavy locks / And the dew it wets my skin / My babe lies cold within my arms / But none will let me in.” Anjelica Huston’s wordless performance of reverence and grief—and her father’s patient capturing of it—brings us to the film’s “last end,” a definitive shift in mood that enters the solitary world of the “thought-tormented.”

The aching threnody has stirred up the heretofore dormant emotions in Gretta that lead us to Joyce’s revelations—which the Hustons faithfully, wisely deploy. Upon returning to their gloomy hotel, Gabriel, feeling painfully distant from his wife, asks Gretta what has unsettled her so. A boy she once loved, she says, named Michael Furey, used to sing “The Lass of Aughrim.” A teenager of fragile constitution, Michael grew grief-stricken when he learned she would be sent to a convent and, after standing by her gate in the rain, caught pneumonia and died at seventeen. “Isn’t it a terrible thing to die so young as that?” Gretta weeps, illuminated in a sliver of moonlight.

Gretta was partly based on Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle, and Michael Furey was inspired by two boys from her youth whose untimely passing changed her: Michael Bodkin, who died from tuberculosis at twenty; and Michael Feeney, who died from typhoid and pneumonia at seventeen. Nora believed Bodkin had died after going out in the rain to visit her. Such autobiographical details make the ending of “The Dead” unbearably poignant, but one need not know the specifics of Joyce’s marriage to grasp the masculine insecurity that Gabriel harbors over his wife’s romantic past or to feel the overwhelming power of Joyce’s words. McCann’s lyrical delivery and his ashen, million-mile stare beautifully articulate a hard truth: Gretta is now tragically inaccessible to him. Huston’s film ends by breaking a rule of screenwriting, suddenly introducing a voice-over narration. Yet there is simply no other possible ending than to hear the voice of Gabriel, the great, reluctant speechmaker. Under Joyce’s immortal summation, words swollen with tender, existential beauty, we see lonesome images, of snow “falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling” across the landscape of a film at once so small and so inexpressible in its magnitude.