TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=93HT0820> <title> 1987: Cinema </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1987 Highlights </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> January 4, 1988 CINEMA BEST of '87 </hdr> <body> Huston's Serene Farewell <qt> <l>THE DEAD</l> <l>Directed by John Huston;</l> <l>Screenplay by Tony Huston</l> </qt> 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 gathered, 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 on-screen 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. -- By Richard Schickel BEST OF '87 BROADCAST NEWS. In James L. Brooks' wickedly nice comedy, the devil (William Hurt) is an anchorman, and a charming one too. Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks shine in this delectable All About Eve for the infotainment age. EMPIRE OF THE SUN. A boy loses his parents and becomes a man: corrupt, scheming, desperate to survive at any cost. This is a Steven Spielberg movie? Yes: an anti-E.T., and his most mature, beautifully crafted fable about childhood. GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM. In Saigon, 1965, the war sneaks up on Disk Jockey Robin Williams, darkening and then silencing his mad-lib monologues. This high comedy from Director Barry Levinson is 1987's deftest evocation of Viet Nam's surrealism. INNERSPACE. Sci-fi satires may finally be B.O. poison, but Director Joe Dante knows how to send the genre out (and up) in a blaze of tangled plots, visual bravura and comic-book savvy. JEAN DE FLORETTE and MANON OF THE SPRING. Forget Wall Street. For a really savage study of greed and relentless connivance, see Claude Berri's double-decker movie. His tale of fate-haunted French peasants is also that movie rarity: tragedy on the grand and classic scale. THE PRINCESS BRIDE. Like Broadway's Into the Woods, William Goldman's script throws an open-house party for fairy-tale heroes, villains and a beyond-gorgeous princes (Robin Wright). Revisionist fun for the whole family. RADIO DAYS. Woody Allen recalls the power of a mass medium and a messy family in shaping a child's imagination. This memory play is also a rueful reflection on the ways time's passage both diminishes and enhances that power. RAISING ARIZONA. Nathan Arizona Jr., that is--the infant kidnaped by a young couple who are aching to be parents. In this wonderfully bizarre romantic comedy, Auteurs Joel and Ethan Coen prove themselves Young Hollywood's last best hope. TAMPOPO. An Eastern western: the cowboy is a truck-driver, his homestead is a Japanese noodle restaurant. Writer-Director Juzo Itami offers a free-range meditation on how gourmet fads deliriously distort man's second favorite drive. THE UNTOUCHABLES. Director Brian De Palma and Writer David Mamet reimagine the gangster epic and create a witty, bloody, touching commentary on two vanished traditions: Hollywood dreammaking and American innocence. </body> </article> </text>