The Dead (1987)
Directed by John Huston
Huston’s swan song stands among the most elegant films, final or otherwise, ever made. Like the James Joyce story it adapts, the film is filled with precisely rendered sense memories: maybe-too-warm bourgeois parlors, benign alcoholism, and, in the elegant final passage, the ache of lost loves. Huston’s adaptation is exactingly faithful but produces a divergent tone. Joyce’s version was a funereal kiss-off to his homeland, but Huston’s is far more buoyant. It delights in the specificity of the author’s character observations and even finds solace in his devastating conclusion, trading the belligerent farewell of driven youth for the reconciled acceptance saying a longer goodbye. Jake Cole (Dec 24, 7:30pm; Dec 26, 8:30pm at the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Huston retrospective)