The Dead

 

Director John Huston

Huston on the set with his son Tony

author James Joyce, 1904

THE DEAD                A                                                                                                            Great Britain  Ireland  USA  (83 mi)  1987  d: John Huston

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window.  It had begun to snow again.  He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight.  The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward.  Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland.  It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.  It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.  It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns.  His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

—James Joyce The Dead, last short story from Dubliners, originally written in 1904, with this longer story added in 1907, not published until 1914, The Dead by James Joyce

John Huston began his career as a screenwriter, and one of the obvious strengths of his work is his attention to dialogue, relying heavily upon literary adaptations as a director, where the great majority of his 36 features, and certainly his best-known ones, were drawn from novels, short stories, or plays, with Huston awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from Trinity College Dublin.  In his storied career, one need only think of THE MALTESE FALCON (1941), a Dashiell Hammett novel, THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), an adventure novel by B. Traven, KEY LARGO (1948), based on a Maxwell Anderson play, THE ASPHALT JUNGLE (1950), a W.R. Burnett novel, THE AFRICAN QUEEN (1951), a C.S. Forester novel, MOBY DICK (1956), a Herman Melville novel, The Misfits, (1961), written by playwright Arthur Miller, THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING (1975), a Rudyard Kipling short story, and WISE BLOOD (1979), a Flannery O’Connor novel, among others, while this last and final film is an adaptation of what is perhaps James Joyce’s most perfect story from Dubliners, a collection of short stories focusing upon a series of characters connected only by the city in which they reside, written when Irish nationalism was at its peak, when a search for a national identity and purpose was paramount, made while he was sitting in a wheelchair while hooked up to an oxygen tank, on the verge of his own death (four months after shooting ended), suffering from terminal emphysema, bringing a vividly personalized atmosphere to the set.  Something of a love letter to Ireland and a merging of kindred artistic spirits, the youthful writer and the aging filmmaker, both coming to terms with their impending mortality, each wondering how they would be remembered and what they would leave behind, borrowing several biographical details from Joyce’s life, as both he and Gabriel Conroy reviewed books for the pro-British Dublin Daily Express, taught in college, became Europeanized, and were largely indifferent to the nationalistic aims of their native country.  Heavily impacted by Joyce ever since his mother smuggled him a copy from Paris during the 1920’s of the then-banned novel Ulysses, writing in his 1980 autobiography An Open Book, “It was probably the greatest experience that any book has ever given me,” actually influencing his decision to move to Ireland in 1952, thoroughly disgusted by the McCarthyist witch hunt spreading through Hollywood at the time, wanting to escape the “moral rot” ruining the lives of many of his friends in the movie industry, eventually becoming an Irish citizen.  Adapted by his son Tony Huston, with an opening dedication “For Maricela,” the director’s longtime nurse and companion Maricela Hernández, this mysteriously complex film also stars his daughter Angelica Huston, who he previously directed in PRIZZI’S HONOR (1985), winning her a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award, where the cast is all-Irish except Angelica Huston, but she grew up in Ireland, having moved there when she was just two years old, and doesn’t miss a beat, with most of the cast coming from Dublin’s Abbey Theatre company, yet what really stands out is the power of the performances.  Angelica Huston has never been so, well - - angelic, for lack of a better word, as she’s usually typecast as a much tougher person, darker and more imposingly complex, an actress whose strong onscreen physicality and elegance is hard to underestimate, yet here she plays Gretta Conroy, the wife of an academic, Gabriel Conroy (Donal McCann), modeled directly after Joyce’s wife, Nora Barnacle (also serving as Joyce’s role model for Molly Bloom in Ulysses), playing a more minor part than her husband, easily overlooked through most of the story.  While she’s outwardly kind and socially considerate, the picture of etiquette and social grace, the story turns on a dime near the end, where out of nowhere she becomes the central focus, almost by accident, as her actions suddenly influence the mood of the entire story, taking a decidedly melancholy trajectory, where all the banalities of ordinary existence and the much anticipated social pretensions, captured in all its drunken comedy and pathos, must be endured in order to appreciate the full emotional power of such a magnificently realized finale, like a beam of light streaming in opening our eyes to what the story is really driving at, suggesting a love for life can also express itself as a complicated love for the dead, becoming a labor of love so unlike Huston’s earlier films, beautifully blending in to the social setting of the turn-of-the-century era. 

Joyce had a complex relationship with Dublin, and Ireland, leaving the city for good after 1909, and after 1912 he never set foot in Ireland again, moving to Italy and then Paris where he was surrounded by like-minded contemporary writers like Marcel Proust, Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and W.B. Yeats, where his reasons were both deeply personal and part of broader societal trends, reflective of what he saw as the spiritual “deadness” of Dublin, while also decrying Irish society’s conservatism, censorship, religious hypocrisy, and zealous nationalism, though his spiritual and artistic engagement with the city continued until the end of his life, while according to Huston, “All I know about filmmaking is in this film.”  Written in 1907 when he was just 25 from an apartment in Trieste, Italy, more than a decade before Ulysses was published in 1922, the film is about memory, loss, and the lasting power of the dead over the living, and while it’s a faithful adaptation, there are additions not included in the original source material, reassigning numerous lines to different characters, while also introducing an entirely new character in Mr. Grace (Seán McClory), who eloquently recites an English translation of an 8th-century Middle Irish poem Donal Óg.  Taking place in Dublin in 1904, a Feast of the Epiphany dinner party, held every year 11 days after Christmas, is hosted by two spinster sisters, Kate and Julia Morkan (Helena Carroll and Cathleen Delany), and their unmarried niece, Mary Jane (Ingrid Craigie), all music teachers, as horse-drawn carriages arrive with formally-dressed guests on the snowy night, where we learn that for years the sisters have functioned as the official center of the city’s cultural world.  While Joyce’s writing provides access to Gabriel’s internal, stream-of-consciousness perspective, including his rapidly shifting observations, memories, and emotional responses, a vantage point that is practically impossible to replicate on the screen, instead Huston fluctuates between newly arriving guests, a joyous occasion seamlessly shifting the perspectives, expressing a range of disagreements among the guests, often confronted with uneasy realities, where it’s easy to get swept away by the accumulative power of the experience, yet it’s also hard not to admire his purely cinematic adaptation for its faithfulness to the time period through lighting, costumes, music, and such eloquent diction, where the acute eye for detail is impressive.  Shot by Fred Murphy, it looks utterly spectacular.  Gabriel is sarcastically teased by the fiery temperament of Molly Ivors (Maria McDermottroe), an Irish nationalist colleague who berates him for writing for The Daily Express, which she refers to as an “English rag,” suggesting he should be ashamed of himself for betraying his Irish identity, calling him a “West Briton,” “someone who looks to England for our salvation instead of depending on ourselves alone,” a reference to the political slogan of Sinn Féin, as she leaves the party early, stomping off to attend a Republican meeting.  Over the course of the festive dinner party, where guests discuss topics of musical and local interest, Mr. Browne (Dan O’Herlihy) arrives with flowers which he likens to the gifts of the Magi (which does not appear in the Joyce story), featuring plenty of music and dancing, with the men hovering around a table in the next room with the drinks, some overzealously, as guests find themselves haunted by spectral figures of an older, near-forgotten Dublin, what Huston’s friend Orson Welles characterized as a “myth of the past.”  Yet Joyce was a literary realist, depicting the sensory texture of thought and feeling, where that consciousness constitutes the essence of human life, yet the past may continually push and prod its way into the present, or may leap into our thoughts at any time, and while the characters may be prone to nostalgia, the story is not.  The festive dancing sequences mirror equally enthralling scenes in a Jane Austen novel, as they are everpresent, with audiences watching the action from behind the camera.  When the dancing subsides, Mary Grace plays a virtuosic showpiece on the piano while Aunt Julie performs a Bellini aria for the guests, though her singing voice has clearly diminished with age, as the camera peers through back rooms filled with memorabilia, a reminder of the ephemeral nature of life, while Mr. Grace reads an extraordinary recitation about a girl whose life is ruined by her passionate love for a man who promised her things he failed to deliver, only to abandon her, as if in the absence of God, Broken Vows [The Dead (John Huston, 1987)] YouTube (3:38).  While Gretta says nothing, the camera lingers on her placid countenance, thinking something only to herself, where it makes you wonder about the poem’s effect on her.     

You have taken the east from me; You have taken the west from me
You have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
You have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me,
And my fear is great that you have taken God from me! 

Mirroring those internalized, personal reflections, the conversation turns to whatever happened to the many great operatic tenors that once flourished in Dublin, lamenting that so few are like them today, turning to the tableside expert in the matter, Bartell D’Arcy (Frank Patterson), a celebrated tenor with a sizeable reputation.  While the name Caruso is mentioned, Aunt Kate recalls someone from her youth by the name of Parkinson, a name no one else recalls, yet just thinking about him stirs something inside, her eyes glistening in tears, with the camera holding on her face in close-up.  This is the magic of memory, where the long-dead continue to live inside, haunting us in ways that nothing else can.  As the guests begin to leave, politely exchanging pleasantries, Gretta gets halfway down the stairs before she pauses, struck by what she hears, as the tenor D’Arcy is singing The Lass of Aughrim offscreen, an Irish variant of a Scottish ballad, a song that shifts back and forth between two former lovers lamenting the failings in their relationship, accentuating the imperfections and fragility of human love which lead to heartbreak and to untimely death, sending her into a prayer-like trance, framed by a stained-glass window, immaculately dressed like the Virgin Mary, with a white shawl around her neck and shoulders, representing purity in every sense of the word, The Lass of Aughrim - Frank Patterson YouTube (2:22).  A flood of memories wash over her as she listens intently, while her husband can only imagine what’s captured her attention, frozen in the moment, aware of the “grace and mystery in her attitude.”  Literally the turning point of the film, the music and storytelling of the evening awaken such intense memories, yet the couple says nothing on the carriage ride back to their hotel.  Only then, with Gabriel having hopes of getting amorous, does she finally break into tears, recalling a tragic childhood romance with a young man named Michael Furey in Galway, who used to sing that song to her, feeling responsible for his death at the age of 17, as he died under the window of her room.  “He was very delicate,” she says, revealing to her husband that Michael was very sick, but left his sick bed and stood outside her window in the cold and rain to say goodbye before she returned to Dublin, dying a week later, confessing “‘I think he died for me.”  The song opened up the floodgates of the pain that she had long repressed, serving as a catalyst which motivates her to remember something so clearly from her past, and while she clearly loves Gabriel and calls him “a very generous person,” she knows that he has never sacrificially given of himself in the way that Michael did for her, which only serves to reveal the lack of true intimacy and genuine love binding the Conroys, bringing about an emotional distance between them.  The cathartic final scene of the film leaves audiences to ponder the strange hold of the past over the present, as well as the impenetrable differences of those who are closest to us.  As Greta tearfully falls asleep in the hotel room, Gabriel is left looking out the window at the falling snow enveloped in darkness and utter solitude, struck by an all-embracing epiphany, realizing that he’s been deceiving himself for all these years, as he was neither Gretta’s first love nor her greatest love, helplessly discovering that he is less than who he thought he was.  His mind wanders to the future, imagining sitting around Aunt Julia’s deathbed, contemplating how he’ll be remembered, if at all, where his place in the world feels so impermanent.  “Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age.”  The final lines of voiceover dialogue spoken over orchestral refrains from The Lass of Aughrim encapsulate his severe desolation and loneliness, questioning his entire life again, reflecting on his existential existence and what it means to be alive before turning into shadows in one of the most profoundly stirring passages in all of literature, The Dead (1987) End Monologue YouTube (4:15), a fitting epitaph for Huston, where it’s hard not to be affected by the extreme intensity and literary potency of the language, mirroring Molly Bloom’s infamous stream-of-conscious soliloquy at the end of Ulysses.  A second camera operator, Scottish Michael Coulter, captures the mesmerizingly beautiful snowy landscapes, where the snow is a metaphor for the vast wasteland and hopelessness experienced by Joyce during the time period, looking out into the uncertainty of his country’s future, while Alex North’s elegiac Celtic harp music plays over both the opening and the end credits.

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The Mustang

Director Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre

one of the correctional inmates from the WHIP program

THE MUSTANG                   B                    

France  USA  (96 mi)  2019 d: Laure de Clermont-Tonnerre

There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham.

—John Manly from Black Beauty, Pt. 1 Chapter 13, a novel by Anna Sewell, 1877

Anyone who’s seen the devastating round-up scene of wild mustangs in John Huston’s The Misfits (1961) has an inkling of what’s happening here, as both take place in the emptiness of the Nevada desert, paying homage to the fierce independent streak of horses that continue to thrive on their own out in open country, with this film suggesting as many as 100,000 of them currently roam free.  With some impressive cinematography by Ruben Impens, an opening sequence registers a thrill of seeing horses in their element running freely through the vast openness of the desert, a symbol of the American West, yet in the backdrop of the snow-covered Sierra Nevada mountains off in the distance a helicopter herds them into a trap where they are stuck like sardines in a tiny pen, traumatized and vehemently frustrated by the tight restrictions, ultimately placed in a truck and driven away.  What this turns into, however, is an examination of our criminal justice system, as we herd people into similar psychologically traumatizing situations, warehoused into tiny prison cells, treated like animals, and then somehow “the system” expects them to turn into productive human beings.  While the metaphor may be blunt and heavy-handed, the assuredness of this first time director is surprisingly effective, drawing people into the heart of the matter without sermonizing.  Well-paced, with evocative music from Jed Kurzel, evolving from a 2017 story in The New York Times, Wild Horses and the Inmates Who 'Gentle' Them - The New York Times, at the center of the picture is Matthias Schoenaerts as Roman Coleman in one of the performances of the year, utterly brilliant in Michaël R. Roskam’s 2012 Top Ten Films of the Year: #6 Bullhead (Rundskop), The Drop (2014), and the more recent Racer and the Jailbird (Le Fidèle) (2017), but also Jacques Audiard’s Rust and Bone (De rouille et d'os) (2011), where his hulking physique often defines his roles.  Not usually much for small talk, he’s even more reticent here, where he appears damaged beyond repair, transferred from a lengthy period in solitary confinement to the regular prison population, yet in a screening interview with the prison psychologist (Connie Britton) his defiant resistance to communicate is remarkable, largely numb to the rest of the world, displaying an inner ferocity, with something angrily registering underneath his unwilling demeanor, basically suggesting he doesn’t do well with people.  With that understanding, he’s assigned to outdoor maintenance, basically shoveling horse manure all day in pens housing these captured mustangs, with a select group of inmates taming and grooming them before they’re auctioned off to ranchers and policemen, including border patrol duty.  But what captures Coleman’s curiosity is an unruly horse locked into tight constraints, repeatedly kicking at the walls, where he can’t help but investigate, as he and this horse appear to share a similar contempt for confinement.

Shot at the abandoned Nevada State Prison in Carson City that shut down a few years ago as a new facility was built nearby, it initially feels weird that they literally throw inmates into the pen with untamed horses without an ounce of training, as if they’re supposed to pick it up on instinct, yet a crusty old-timer, Myles (Bruce Dern), the civilian head of the program (aka WHIP, Wild Horse Inmate Program, which exists in 6 Western states), noticed Coleman’s earlier interest in the obstinate horse, thinking maybe these two intractable minds think alike, yet he shows little aptitude.  Encouraged by one of the prisoners, Henry, Jason Mitchell from Mudbound (2017) and Straight Outta Compton (2015), who views himself as the best horse trainer in the facility, offering quick instructions on the fly, telling him to move in sync with the horse, like dance moves, but no progress is made.  When Myles shouts out instructions to take control, rather than move into the horse’s space, Coleman sends a flurry of punches directly at the animal, which gets him quickly kicked out of the program, with Myles spewing he’ll add ten years to his sentence if that ever happens again.  Nonetheless, he spent some quality time with the animal, more than anyone else, with the horse remaining proudly defiant.  There are other narratives within the prison, which includes a visit from his daughter, Martha (Gideon Adlon, impressive), who remains standoffish, clearly having unresolved issues with her father, but his signature is needed to sell the house, as he certainly has no use of it, yet whatever the cause of their underlying friction remains unspoken, providing no backstory.  Nonetheless, the tension between them adds a dramatic extension to the film, broadening the gap of his dysfunction.  Martha offers no sympathy whatsoever, is stone cold, herself, playing it dead serious throughout, never giving her father even an inch.  Similarly, there is a drug smuggling ring inside the prison stealing Ketamine, an animal tranquilizer drug kept for the horses, which some prisoners use to get high (and has other effective uses, none more startling than this story, Thai cave rescuers, who sedated boys, coach to get them out ...), coercing others, including Coleman, implying something sinister could happen to his daughter if he doesn’t go along, as they know where she lives.  This kind of extortion runs rampant in prison systems, with inmates constantly under threat, with outside gang connections used to establish advantages inside, applying common terror tactics when needed to amp up the pressure.  In addition, there is underlying racial friction, with blacks and whites maintaining their own separate space, seen constantly antagonizing each other out in the prison yard, like a powder keg about to explode.  This is the real beauty of the film, an examination of a toxic male culture, where it’s an astute and intriguing analysis of what happens inside American prison walls, particularly coming from a European director.       

External circumstances create a diversion, as a huge wind storm erupts, spooking the animals, with all hands on deck bringing them to covered shelter, including Coleman and his recalcitrant horse, raising the eyebrows of Myles who offers him another chance afterwards.  Still, the horse refuses to respond, exhausting the patience of Coleman, who’s never tasted success inside the pen, thwarted at every turn, encouraged by Henry who reminds him, “If you want to control your horse, first you gotta control yourself.”  This may as well be the mantra for altering the direction in his life, as up until now he’s continually been banging his head against the wall, exerting his will, but the wall never budges.  Only once he’s finally stymied, reduced to a man stewing in his own personal failures, sitting alone on an upside down bucket literally talking to himself does the horse finally come around and acknowledge his presence.  Pent-up rage and macho gesturing got him absolutely nowhere, but once he finally settled down and allowed the horse to come to him, this established some mutual trust.  After a few minor mishaps, Coleman was assigned to the program, one of the selected few allowed to participate, where the underlying principle is the developing relationship with the animal helps teach empathy, with brutish men often feeling more at ease with their horses than any of the people within the prison compound.  At the same time, more meetings with the psychologist leads to group sessions, some of which are interesting, especially when she asks each of them how long it took to make the decision that ultimately led them into prison.  With most it was no more than a few seconds, and in Coleman’s case, a split second.  It’s an agonizing road to realize how much has been lost by that split decision.  However, in the next visit with Martha, Coleman is eager to make amends, excited to tell her about the progress with his horse, acknowledging his crimes and trying to painfully accept responsibility, offering the first signs of reconciliation, and while it’s among the more moving scenes of the film, she’s not easily moved, reminding him in graphic detail what he forced her life to become, leaving him a shell of himself afterwards, as he simply has no answers.  Yet it’s moments like this that make this film relevant, as there’s no right way or wrong way, and no easy path, but at least it’s a beginning.  There’s a stirring sequence when we hear Martha in voiceover read aloud letters she wrote to her father when she was much younger, when she still had hope, when he was still her father, when he meant something to her, but that was long ago.  Since then much time has passed, leaving him with an open wound that may never heal, and he has no one else to blame but himself.  It’s a startling revelation that must happen to so many men locked up for lengthy sentences, like a light bulb finally turning on, and perhaps for the first time they realize the full extent of what’s been lost.  While there are other stirring moments, even a kind of mythical Black Beauty kinship established with the horse, they feel more contrived and of lesser value, though the WHIP program itself has helped significantly reduce the rate of repeat offenders, yet what seems to matter most is taking an honest assessment of yourself and the crime you’ve committed.  The sad fact is there are plenty more like Coleman, a revolving door of new faces filling the prison cells while he slowly works through his issues in a tiny rectangular cell out in the middle of nowhere, where redemption only happens with a thorough cleansing of the soul.