This movie hints at secrets that are akin to something one experiences as a child who, lying awake and alone one night, spies a star outside the window and for an instant glimpses the Unspeakable. No rose sprouts in these drifts only long-buried yearnings that waft like a vapor around headstones. But her chance for love is gone, crushed beneath layers of dashed hopes now piled high like the snows of Ireland in the movie. At one point, after a guest recites a moving poem, one of the female guests laments, "Imagine being loved like that." She means a devotion so intense as to rearrange our psyches. Others are like Michael Fury, dying in a freezing river as he stares at the house where his Beloved conducts her affairs, unresponsive to him. Many characters in the movie spend their whole lives at that bedroom window. But how? Alas, we can only stand at the bedroom window alone, watching the snowfall like Anjelica Huston's husband (Donal McCann) does at the movie's end.
If only we could share that Light with someone, or at least share a quest for it. We feel that somewhere burns an unseen, silent, and impossibly distant Light. Beauty like this makes us want to find someone, open our jugular vein, and urgently bleed into them. At dinner, tenor Frank Patterson sings for the guests, his lovely voice stealing through the walls like the scent of a garden into a tomb.
But years later, when this kind of passion is deemed the only thing that matters, people privately develop a more respectful take on such things. Such actions strike the idle passerby as pathetic (savage Americans would label Michael Fury a "loser"). (Those who have not experienced this will deem it maudlin.) For example, in the story, Anjelica Huston's character refers to one "Michael Fury" whose love for her had burned so intensely that he allowed himself to freeze to death in a river because he could not be hers. Everyone here longs for love - not just ordinary fondness, but a condition where one almost sees God in the other person. It is a snapshot of people who either loved and lost, or never got to love at all. "The Dead" shows us a turn-of-the-century Irish dinner party attended by a host of lost souls.
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