James Joyce's longish short story (from "Dubliners"), brought to the screen posthumously by John Huston. This is the stagiest and stuffiest brand of literary adaptation, the kind of thing you expect to see on PBS by way of the BBC, made by someone looking for a short cut to profundity. If Huston had made it twenty or thirty years earlier everyone would have been quite right to wonder why he had so limited himself, but of course it has now been given special dispensation by the fact that it's forever and always to be Huston's last film, and by the eerie conjunction of its title and his present society. The original author had more than one kind of deadness in mind, though, and it would be wrong to get overly misty about it on that account. At least as much to the point would be the unadventurousness of the project, an exercise in wallpaper and drapes and dusky globed light, with identical exterior shots of the main setting to introduce each of the three "acts," and with final recourse to some reading-from-the-text (altered from Third Person to First) to put a point on it at the curtain. Donal McCann, Anjelica Huston, Dan O'Herlihy. (1987) — Duncan Shepherd
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