The Dead

Watched John Huston's The Dead last night. I found this beautiful, haunting film extraordinarily moving, and bought myself a copy to keep from Amazon right away. I don't buy many films, but I know I will want to see this again and again. It's a work of great depth and richness; Huston's final film (he died soon after completing it). It's a small-scale film, whose settings consist of merely one house, the inside of a carriage, and a hotel room, yet by the end one is left with a feeling of being cut adrift in the vastness of time and space. It lays bare the transience of life, and the disappointments that come to blight, overshadow and diminish early idealism and hope, yet one is left with the feeling that home, family and friends can prove an anchor of sorts to help guide us through the mists and swamps with which life presents us.
There's a great deal of warmth, love and humour in this film, and one gets the feeling that Huston wanted the film to be a final love letter to his ancestral homeland. His depiction of the sprawling group of friends and family, gathered together to celebrate Twelfth Night, manages, paradoxically, to convey loss, yearning and a deep emptiness and melancholy, yet joy and good humour at the same time.
I'll certainly read The Dubliners now, the collection where one can find 'The Dead'. I've never read any James Joyce - I've never been able to manage his novels but have always been aware that there's more to him than Finnegan's Wake.