Ulysses

To adapt the words of some venerable Austrian nuns, how do you solve a problem like 'Ulysses'? Considered by most to be the greatest book of the 20th century, it is also, notoriously, one of its most difficult. How do you film a book where each character exists in a narrative set on 16 June, 1904, but also corresponds parodically to Greek mythology. Where each chapter is a parody, pastiche, interrogation of a whole host of literary styles and conventions, where almost every line is an allusion, crucially mutated, to literature, theology, philosophy, history etc. Where each character, event, setting, is subject to rigorous verbal deconstruction, so that they can seem to dissolve in front of our eyes, and put back in playfully different combinations; or where whole episodes evolve from word games. Where each setting is rich in historical significance, providing a meta-narrative to all the squabbling narratives that comprise 'Ulysses'.

Take, for example, the episode 'Proteus', where Stephen Dedalus walks on the beach. In the book, his mixture of observation and thought creates an unsettling, difficult text, where what he sees and what he thinks meld indistinguishably into one another, and the reader risks getting lost, fixed as he is in the flux of Stephen's head, not guided by an impartial narrator. We travel in fragments, on a Dublin beach, through the centuries, from Elsinore to the Renaissance to Paris, from literature and politics to memory, all the while doused in vast philosophical imponderables. Strick shows us a young man walking on a beach chased by a dog to the bathetic recitation of the novel's words. On paper, the dog inspires a number of puns, including colonialism, intellectual slavery and man's mortality. Here it's just a dog. The words are full of soundbites such as 'ineluctable modality of the visible', phrases that have to be gone over, worked out, understood, necessitating maybe even a dictionary. To have them sped read seems self-defeating, unless you know the book, and if you are only making a film for people who've read the book, than what's the point?

Strick films the formal landmine of 'Ulysses' with a studied focus on narrative. He avoids structural rupture, or any attempt to translate the novel's techniques, many borrowed from cinema, into film. A true 'Ulysses' would require someone with fiendish formal daring, a massive intellect, a sense of history and place, but also someone with a love of stories, resonant sentimentality, and popular culture, and, especially, a taste for farce. Godard of the 60s, maybe, or Richard Lester. Or some unholy mixture of Welles, Huston and Gerald Thomas.

ULYSSES is redundant, full of scenes slavishly recreated with dialogue spouted verbatim, but arbitrarily selected so that they make no sense. It might have been an idea to take a couple of digestible narrative lines and create a film around them, but Strick wants to get everything, and, in a standard feature film, can only give a few minutes to each episode, which makes a nonsense of them. Even on this level, his filming is fizzleless, flat, cautious, as if what is said in 'Ulysses' is crucial, when, of course, it's how it's said that counts. The crucial dichotomy of the novel, between Stephen's intellectualism and Bloom's corporeality, is fudged, and the triangle between Stephen (man), Bloom (womanly man) and Molly (woman) only comes about by pilfering the book's structure.

This is the accepted view of the film, and it is theoretically accurate. It makes the film sound inept, which, as Joyce, it may be, but it is very entertaining. Milo O'Shea is an incomparable Bloom, transcending the leaving cert level script, capturing this hero's multifaceted humanity in all its inglorious glory, his decency and desire, his tragedy and sense of exclusion (the mirroring of virulent racism in Bloom's time with our own more sophisticated age is chilling), and his peerless good humour.

He is supported by an extraordinary cast, many of whom are familiar from TV or theatre, and anyone who is not Irish will completely miss the frisson of seeing Dinny Byrne as a cheeky Lothario, on a birthday-suited pedestal, or, most alarming of all, Mrs. Cadogon as a leather-booted, whip-wielding Madame. Barbara Jefford is an extraordinary Molly Bloom, that hothouse flower spending the day in bed, voluptuously ordinary; her soliloquy is one of the best things in the film - it completely bypasses Joyce's intentions, but in its mixture of voiceover and silent, literal imagery it achieves a dreamlike power reminiscent of Perec/Queysanne's later UN HOMME QUI DORT.

There is great humour throughout, usually courtesy of Bloom, my favourite being his entry into a cafe of uncommonly audible munchers; the Nightown sequence, though again a travesty, is great fun, more Nabokov or Flann O'Brien in its Carrollian topsy-turvy, even if you wish, as did John Devitt who introduced the film, that it had been magicked by Fellini.

This was a Bloomsday treat at the Irish Film Centre. And the print itself was of historic interest, in that it was a censored one from the 1960s. Instead of cutting offending scenes, the sound was simply turned down, signalled by an amusing warning noise, or the picture being blacked out. Luckily I have the video (and the book!) so I went to check what I'd missed, which wasn't very much, some innuendo, a few choice epithets and Molly's orgasmic face. The decisions behind the censoring were erratic, as some scenes left intact seemed more fruity than some of the victims. In a film based on words, this vandalism, interrupting especially a soliloquy of snowballing impact, made me increasingly furious, and reminded me that relative liberalisation in this country after decades of Franco-like repression, was not all that distantly achieved.

There was real pleasure, as a Dubliner, though, in seeing the city of my parents in clean monochrome - due presumably to budgetary constrictions, Strick made no attempt to recreate turn-of-the-century Dublin, making another evasion of Joyce, but achieving something pleasantly different none the less. And as I could never have hoped, Martin Dempsey is perfect as my favourite Joycean character, Simon Dedalus, like all his friends mean-minded, selfish, dreadful, but capable of great humour, and in his recitation of a heartmeltingly sad melody, emotional beauty.

Norman Mailer once observed, "There is a particular type of really bad novel that makes a great motion picture." With that in mind, this feeble attempt to film the greatest 20th Century English novel falls flat, as pointless an exercise as dramatizing "The Leviathan" by Thomas Hobbes or the Declaration of Independence. It just can't be done. Joyce pioneered the plotless novel, concentrating on character development and situation, together with the melding of his characters' inner thoughts running in a hodge-podge of images and overlapping, run-on sentences. For those unfamiliar with the work, "Ulysses" is the story of an author in search of a character about whom he can write a novel: two men, one middle-aged, one young, wandering aimlessly through Dublin for 18 hours, finally meeting in a brothel, and then discussing their day over a cup of cocoa. That's it. Joyce himself joked that he had written a novel that would keep English professors busy for the next century, and the deciphering of his masterpiece has become a cottage industry. This is not a motion picture: rather, it is a tour de force in the nature of Charles Laughton reading from the New York Telephone directory: the presentation may be brilliant, but the exercise is pointless. The actors recite Joyce's prose brilliantly and Milo O'Shea, Maurice Reeves and Barbara Jefford, as Leopold Bloom, Stephen Daedalus and Molly Bloom respectively, look exactly like what one would imagine the characters to appear, but this is hardly enough to sustain the viewers' interests for an excess of two hours. Literary critic John Greenway observed, "To read it ['Ulysses'] with ease, one should have a PhD in comparative languages and literature." Indeed, Joyce himself spoke some 15 languages fluently and his work abounds with multiple lingual puns. Caveat: unless you have at least majored in English Literature and taken a graduate course in James Joyce, you won't have the slightest idea what is going on here - nor will you care.

To attempt to film this major body of work is indeed senseless. To film one page of Ulysses would take almost 2 hours to complete. This version does not represent the complete novel, it offers only flimsy elements that keep it amusing and lucid. If you are attempting to read the novel for the first time, then watch this film first, it won't hurt...it won't help either! I wanted very much to like this film, but felt a bit cheated because of the indulgence of the director. I was expecting an enigmatic piece of work...what I got was, let's film the good parts and stuff the complexities. I could not relate to the actors...maybe that's the problem. A bold attempt nonetheless!

The one utterly 'unfilmable' novel was indeed filmed, and with a fair degree of success, by Joseph Strick in 1967. "Ulysses" is set over the course of one day, June 16th, 1904 in Dublin, now celebrated annually as 'Bloomsday' in deference to the book's central character, Leopold Bloom but Strick chose to update it to the time the film was made perhaps on the basis that the novel itself is 'timeless' or maybe on the basis that the events depicted could have happened at any time. It charts a journey through Dublin by Bloom and Stephen Dedalus, the young teacher and hero of Joyce's more accessible "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man".

It is, of course, the book that sits on the shelves of the intelligensia, mostly unread, but essential to show off; the stream of consciousness novel to end them all. On the other hand, it may have gone unread for years as it was originally banned in most countries on the grounds of obscenity. That the film works at all is a great credit to Strick but mostly the critics didn't go for it feeling, perhaps, that the director over-simplified it, changing the text and that the updating was tantamount to sacrilige. He also chose to shoot it in widescreen when the material may have cried out for something more intimate but it is superbly shot by Wolfgang Suschitzky while the cast are mostly splendid. Milo O'Shea is a superb Bloom and Barbara Jefford is outstanding as his wife, Molly while the Dublin locations now add up to a great time capsule of what life was like there in the mid-sixties.

Having finished James Joyce's monumental masterpiece "Ulysses" at about two in the morning last night, I decided to reward myself today by finally viewing Joseph Strick's critically acclaimed adaptation of the work. I was highly interested in seeing how certain mindbogglingly difficult and seemingly unfilmable sections from the novel were portrayed by his lens, and I was left impressed and entertained. While a truly proper adaptation of Joyce's massive literary landmark would be about twelve times the length of this experiment, Strick's "Ulysses" is a fine and almost flawless attempt at condensing and adapting the perplexing classic to the big screen. The performers chosen are all excellent, both visually and performance-wise the actors embody what one's mind likely interpreted the iconic characters whilst reading the original work.

Although I seem to be solely using this review to be comparing the film to the book, I should also point out that even if the novel never existed, this would be among the greatest movies of its kind. This is an avant garde journey through the streets of Dublin that is crafted brilliantly on all cinematic fronts. The many beautiful locations are shot with lovely black and white cinematography, (as I already mentioned) the performances are fantastic, the editing is noticeably well done, and the final product has the ability to be both a companion to Joyce's novel and a wonderful work of art in its own right. Here, you will find much to love, and the two hour running time flies by. Seriously, this film feels much faster than two hours, similarly to how the original novel felt much shorter than 700 pages (at least in my opinion anyway, since many others loathe the book and find it tedious and WAY overlong).

Joyce's prose seems necessary to be heard rather than just read, and the final segment, this being Molly Bloom's beautiful (and dirty) soliloquy, masters the challenge of reading the master's work aloud. It is read with grace, passion, and character in a way that conveys all of the humor and pain and extreme sexual desire hidden within Joyce's many pages of inner monologue. This is a (or perhaps THE) masterpiece of the little-practiced genre of "stream of consciousness filmmaking".