Huston's Serene Farewell THE DEAD

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The young James Joyce wrote The Dead in some disillusionment. It was the last story of Dubliners, a group of tales setting forth the cramped spirit of the middle-class Ireland from which he had exiled himself even before the book was published.

The aged John Huston filmed The Dead -- the last of his 37 features -- in great serenity, just before he died last summer. In it he set forth his affection for the writer he said he loved best and, paradoxically, for the Ireland to which he exiled himself for the midpassage of a life that was, in its way, as restless and troublesome as Joyce's.

On the feast of the Epiphany, Jan. 6, 1904, some old friends gather, as they have for many years on this day, at the home of two elderly sisters for dancing and supper. They sing songs and make speeches. They quarrel about the opera and worry about the drunkenness of one man while not noticing that another is getting quietly blotto. It's every awful party we have ever attended, and Huston is wonderfully ambiguous about it: affectionate toward the hospitable impulses at work here, slyly satirical about the clumsy ways these impulses are expressed.

At the end of the party, a tenor sings an old air, The Lass of Aughrim. This puts Gretta Conroy (Anjelica Huston) in a pensive mood: a delicate young man she once loved, and who hastened his death by courting her, used to sing it. In their hotel room, Gretta tells her husband Gabriel (Donal McCann) about this lost love, arousing an unworthy jealousy. She falls asleep, and he stares out the window, as the snow -- symbol of the universe's indifference to petty social preoccupations and petty emotions too -- falls "upon all the living and the dead." Nature, playing no favorites, blankets them all together.

Huston has precisely duplicated onscreen both the simple two-part structure of Joyce's story and much of its dialogue. The old Hollywood adventurer's mood and motives do not compromise Joyce's vision; they tactfully illuminate it. Indeed, Huston's handling of this material is so direct, artless and unassertive that one's first enthusiasm for it is tempered by doubt. Perhaps our desire that his last movie represent the best of his several selves is coloring our reaction. Mistrust, however, must yield to Huston's trust of his medium, his material and himself.

He was working in very tight spaces here, but they never make him claustrophobic. His camera is like a calm, courtly stranger at this revel, quietly accepting its physical restraints, determined to make the best of its intimacy with a marvelous ensemble of actors. They, in turn, are charmingly unpretentious as they reveal the humanity beneath their unpromising surfaces.

When the celebration of Epiphany gives way to the Joycean epiphany of Gabriel's concluding thoughts, Huston yields the screen to his beloved master in a wonderfully self-effacing way. The powerful words are voiced over the simplest imaginable montage of Irish snowscapes. Huston's great contribution is only this: he gently imparted to his film an old man's tolerance for human frailty, thereby tempering a young man's impatience with it.

It is quite enough. With this graceful Dead, Huston served his source generously and himself handsomely, contriving what few in film have managed: a sublimely moving exit.