James Joyce author

Ulysses novel

Dubliners stories

A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man novel

Finnegans Wake novel

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Editor Eric

Ulysses
(1967 DVD)

Bloom
(2004 DVD)

Ulysses

It's probably a safe bet that few moviegoers who don't know the book Ulysses would bother with a film based on it. Why would they? The novel's stream-of-consciousness narration and its pastiche of literary styles are virtually impossible to convey in visual media. Take these print characteristics away, strip Ulysses to its action, and you find James Joyce's novel is really not much of a story. Two men wander around Dublin and eventually meet up to share a cup of cocoa. Not exactly a romantic or thrilling entertainment. Knowledge of this fact has to affect how any filmmaker or any film reviewer approaches an adaptation. A film of Ulysses has got to be for those who have read the book, or at least have tried to.

The talkie version
Accordingly the 1967 adaptation of Ulysses is quite a literary, talkative film, very faithful to the novel—almost a students' notes primer. The reader can go through it with a checklist of the highlights of Leopold Bloom's and Stephen Dedalus's travels, ticking off the famous lines of dialogue ("History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake"), the major themes (the hold of the church on Ireland, anti-Semitism, the father-son relationship, sexual repression), the perils that Joyce sets up as ironic parallels of those in Homer's Odyssey (the sirens on the beach, the Hades of the red-light district), as well as almost the entirety of Molly Bloom's uncensored concluding monologue. The black-and-white texture of the film seems to emphasize its reliance on text.

Of course, you could fit only a small fraction of Joyce's long, complicated work into a watchable film. Writers Fred Haines and Joseph Strick (Strick also producing and directing), were nominated for an Academy award for their brilliant job of boiling it down into a couple of hours without distorting the novel entirely. Strick went on to do A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in 1977.

The acting is also quite capable, starting with the star of stage, film and television, Milo O'Shea, as a perfect Leopold Bloom—meek, bumbling, clever, libidinous, courageous and kind-hearted all at once. A young Maurice Roëves, known for his later British TV appearances including on Eastenders, is a distracted Stephen Dedalus. Barbara Jefford is a slatternly Molly Bloom. T.P. McKenna, who later played Stephen's father in Portrait of the Artist, is wicked as Stephen's intellectual friend, Buck Mulligan, though he is not "Stately, plump" as described in the novel's first words. A host of other terrific Irish and English character actors add realistic support as Dubliners.

But the serious distortion in the film for booklovers is due to the film not being a book. Instead of sensing the world as filtered and distorted through the individual characters' streams of thought as in the novel, we are presented each scene visually as it is—with the characters' external and internal dialogue overlaying it. Stephen's stroll across the beach, for instance, in the novel is a convolution of emotions, intellectual ideas and free associations with all that he sees and thinks; in the film it becomes simply a man walking across a beach pretending to be blind and having a few voice-over observations. Similarly Bloom's description of what he sees about town, his associations, his prurient fantasies and anxieties, can only be hinted at in the cinematic sight of the funny little man in a bowler hat as he walks the streets.

The fantasy sequences in particular are too much in our face, coming across more as dress-up charades than as elaborate subconscious inventions. Too literal. Too much in our eyes rather than in our mind's-eyes.

Despite all this criticism about how the film falls short of the novel, it's still surprisingly good for a fan of the supposedly unfilmable novel. Obviously made on a modest budget but ambitious, it is quite successful in getting across the brunt of the novel.

However, as you likely know from my comments on the novel, I'm not a big fan of the novel. It's way too long and dull for one thing. The film at 120 minutes is also too slow and dull in parts. Even the best part of the book, Molly's earthy soliloquy, seems to go on and on when one is watching it illustrated line by line on film.

The sexy version
The latest film of Ulysses fares somewhat better in this regard. The Irish production of Bl.,m (no typos, that's the title, although it's usually referred to as Bloom) raised a controversy in the U.K. when released in 2004 for not being as faithful to the book. It drops major scenes such as Bloom at the newspaper office and adds minor sequences not found in the novel. At 99 minutes it is obviously too short to deliver the full depth and breadth of Joyce's thick, complex novel.

But the literary-minded critics are missing a key point. This adaptation recreates the Joycean vision as a movie. This non-literal, colourful remaking comes closer than the more literal version in delivering the sensual experience of the original literature.

Molly Bloom's bawdy soliloquy from her bedroom is used to frame the work rather than merely conclude it, and we get her unspoken comments on her husband and lovers intermittently throughout the piece. This integrates Molly's story with that of Leopold and Stephen, rather than keep it strangely separate as it appears in the novel and the 1967 film. It also adds depth and poignancy to Bloom's own stream-of-conscious rambles as he roams the house city. Angeline Ball's sexy Molly is a straightforward lustful and lusty creature, but almost innocently so, not a slattern at all, and we see her genuine affection for Poldy, as she calls him, peeping through.  

Veteran Irish actor Stephen Rea appears at first to be a mousy Bloom, going about with a hangdog look on his face. Not at all the buffoon of the earlier portrayal. A quiet, serious man going about his business in an often hostile, ridiculing social environment. But we come to see him as heroic as he lashes back at anti-Semitism. Moreover, we come to see his acquiescence in his spouse's obvious infidelity and his putting up with her ignorance not as the demeanor of a wife-whipped man but as a kind of respectful love.

Not that he is entirely noble. A scene of masturbating on the beach at the sight of a young woman's knickers and the hallucinogenic nighttown sequences get him down to the basics on a par with his wife.

What suffers in this version is the relation between Bloom and Dedalus. Much is made of Bloom's regret over having lost a son at birth, setting up the union of the two men as a father-son substitution. And their meeting after an evening in the brother is momentarily touching but the late-night time they spend together finding an intellectual rapport is only briefly depicted, leaving no emotional reverberations.

Hugh O'Conor (the young Christy Brown in My Left Foot) is a laudable Stephen Dedalus, shining especially in witty scenes with his students, employers and fellow layabouts (including Alvaro Lucchesi, who is stately and plump, as jovial cynic Buck Mulligan).

Overall, the critics are right in pointing out only parts of Joyce's story are told, but they are told as a rich—I could even say, loving—cinematic experience. Not everyone's cup of tea. The novel is still basically unfilmable. But this one comes close to getting across some of the essential passion beneath all those words.

— Eric