Post by Capo on Jul 20, 2009 19:45:37 GMT
Nobody bar Kino seems to have seen this; I'd be interested in others' thoughts. (Spoilers within.)
I found it insufficient. It's a short feature, and a confident one for Huston to end his career with. But I found it structurally problematic and thematically insubstantial.
First, the structure: a Christmas gathering of friends and family, played out over a one-night=one-film narrative. It's very austere, and the great mass of faces and voices are sufficiently introduced but - with the exception of one or two - never quite maintained, so that the final result feels somewhat thin, or truncated, more than succinct.
As it unfolds, the narrative perspective becomes more interested in one character in particular, Gabriel Conroy, to the point that, whereas the narrative began without him (though it impatiently awaits his entrance), it is unable to finish with anybody but him. About to leave the party, Conroy and his wife Gretta are held spellbound by a woman singing upstairs. It's a drawn-out moment that reaches an emotional epiphany through its very mysteriousness - why does Gretta cry so, why is Gabriel seemingly unable to look away from her?
Henceforth, we leave the party and follow the two to their own home, whence the wife's memory of a past love - and the revelation that she was somehow responsible for his death - sends Gabriel into an introspective, melancholic-thus-hopeful rumination. It's a curious and affecting final sequence in itself, but one that I suspect found a more natural, sweeping transition from the more externalised viewpoint hitherto in the original James Joyce short. (I have Dubliners, a collection of shorts that ends with "The Dead"; I must read it.)
As it is, Tony Huston's script is clunky, which undercuts the strong, methodic confidence of director John's approach. Joyce is a master of taking an external event and internalising it into an overwhelmed self-consciousness on a character's part, that obliterates a sense of self through placing it into a huge cosmos of grander significance. But this film's final perspectival shift into poetic self-awareness - or simply a more individual viewpoint - feels unwarranted.
I found it insufficient. It's a short feature, and a confident one for Huston to end his career with. But I found it structurally problematic and thematically insubstantial.
First, the structure: a Christmas gathering of friends and family, played out over a one-night=one-film narrative. It's very austere, and the great mass of faces and voices are sufficiently introduced but - with the exception of one or two - never quite maintained, so that the final result feels somewhat thin, or truncated, more than succinct.
As it unfolds, the narrative perspective becomes more interested in one character in particular, Gabriel Conroy, to the point that, whereas the narrative began without him (though it impatiently awaits his entrance), it is unable to finish with anybody but him. About to leave the party, Conroy and his wife Gretta are held spellbound by a woman singing upstairs. It's a drawn-out moment that reaches an emotional epiphany through its very mysteriousness - why does Gretta cry so, why is Gabriel seemingly unable to look away from her?
Henceforth, we leave the party and follow the two to their own home, whence the wife's memory of a past love - and the revelation that she was somehow responsible for his death - sends Gabriel into an introspective, melancholic-thus-hopeful rumination. It's a curious and affecting final sequence in itself, but one that I suspect found a more natural, sweeping transition from the more externalised viewpoint hitherto in the original James Joyce short. (I have Dubliners, a collection of shorts that ends with "The Dead"; I must read it.)
As it is, Tony Huston's script is clunky, which undercuts the strong, methodic confidence of director John's approach. Joyce is a master of taking an external event and internalising it into an overwhelmed self-consciousness on a character's part, that obliterates a sense of self through placing it into a huge cosmos of grander significance. But this film's final perspectival shift into poetic self-awareness - or simply a more individual viewpoint - feels unwarranted.