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As the centenary of Bloomsday approaches, Sean Walsh’s flawed but fun film is a serviceable way to mark the occasion for those not inclined to drag out their dog-eared copies of Ulysses. Of course, any director trying to shoot Joyce’s cosmic and microcosmic dramedy is at a disadvantage. First, the book is so long that a truncated version with hurried pacing is a practical necessity. (Maybe that’s why Walsh doesn’t call his film Ulysses, like Joseph Strick’s 1967 effort.) And how do you bring a book that’s relayed primarily through absent-minded musings and sensory stimuli to the screen? Walsh solves the stream-of-consciousness problem semi-successfully by playing voiceovers over footage of Leopold Bloom (Stephen Rea, embodying the role perfectly) and Stephen Dedalus (Hugh O’Connor) as they peregrinate through Ireland’s capital. (Although the fact that present-day Dublin has a good many more Mercedes than it did on June 16, 1904, limits the on-camera perambulating.) Another question, though, is who’ll be watching? Quibblers will bewail the liberties taken with the text — some of them gratuitous and perplexing, like starting the film with the closing soliloquy murmured dreamily by Molly Bloom (Angeline Ball), and having her speak directly to the camera. Bloom plays down major themes — Leopold Bloom’s Jewishness, Molly’s infidelity — whose exploration might open the movie up to a general audience. And will those who haven’t read the book know or care why Poldy is explaining metempsychosis to his nonplussed wife, or how Stephen "proves by algebra" that Hamlet’s grandson is Shakespeare’s grandfather? Some chapters are omitted ("Sirens") or dealt with in a single scene ("Aeolus"). But the hallucinatory nightmare of "Circe" is all the outlandish fun it should be, allowing Rea to strut his slapstick stuff as he morphs from character to character. Perhaps this amateur Joycean is asking too much — especially when the book’s everyman stuff is all there: Stephen pissing on the strand, Buck Mulligan waving his snotrag, Blazes Boylan taking Molly furiously from behind, and, of course, Bloom camped in the outhouse with his tattered copy of Titbits, an image punctuated with a plangent plopping sound. (113 minutes)
BY MIKE MILIARD
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