John Huston’s The Dead (1987)

Abstract

This essay examines John Huston’s The Dead as the culmination of his career as an adapter of serious literary works for the screen and his lifelong Hibernophilia. Joyce’s story and Huston’s film are at once a celebration of family and community, the arts of music and poetry, and a meditation on individual human destiny. Huston undertakes the difficult task of translating Joyce’s densely intertextual language into immediate visual terms. His film becomes, in consequence, a spectacularly reductive version of the Edwardian ambience and social plot of Joyce’s work. The essay undertakes a detailed critique of the filming, casting, screenplay, and reception of the film. It considers the strengths and weaknesses of Tony Huston’s screenplay, observing that the central intelligence of his father’s camera eye replaces the concealed narrator and free indirect discourse of Joyce’s masterpiece.