How many times must one let fall on deaf ears the elementary truth that no great work of literature can be turned into a comparable movie? We should all know by now that form is part of the content: a sonnet can’t be turned into an epic, a mural can’t be translated into a miniature, the most artistic photograph of a statue is nowhere near the statue. In a piece of great fiction, it is the descriptions, reflections, paragraphs, sentences, words, and cadences that make the art, not just plot and dialogue. And what writing leaves to the inner eye and ear is inevitably distorted or oversimplified by transposition for the outer senses. James Joyce’s last and greatest story, or novella, “The Dead,” is no exception.
Its film version, The Dead, is the last work of the multifariously talented John Huston, who once actually managed to make a very good film out of Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood— significantly, however, not her finest or subtlest work. Moreover it is somewhat easier to cut down a short novel to movie format than to expand a story, even as long a one as “The Dead,” to full film size. Tony Huston, the screenwriter and John’s son, has had to add a passage or two from Joyce’s other fiction to eke it out, but that is the least of the film’s problems.
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