Dir.
Joseph Strick, 1967, Ireland/UK, 132 mins
Cast:
Milo O'Shea, Maurice Roeves, Barbara Jefford, Martin Dempsey, T. P. McKenna
Set over the course of twenty-four hours on the 16 th June 1904, Ulysses depicts a day and a night in the life of Dublin and of two of it's residents - Stephen Dedalus an aspiring poet, and Leopold Bloom, a middle aged advertising salesman, who's wife Molly is having an affair. We see the two, and hear their thoughts, as they go about their day, meet each other and ultimately go their separate ways. Maurice Roeves gives a suitably restrained performance as the gloomy Stephen, and provides a great contrast to Milo O'Shea's touching, tragicomic Bloom. Bloom's audacious daydreams form much of the film - his ridiculous imagined trial for sexual impropriety is one of the highpoints of the story and O'Shea shows a great comic talent. Barbara Jefford also shines, giving an alternately appealing and repellent turn as Bloom's unfaithful wife Molly. And her rambling explicit monologue ends the film, as it did the book, in memorable style. In addition to these performances, director Joseph Strick portrays the complex character of the city, its many people, accents, winding streets, smoky pubs, friendly conversations and elicit meetings. Indeed Joyce once said of Ulysses "I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book." In bringing the famed modernist novel to the screen, Strick chose wisely not to emulate the writer's epic ambition. Whilst the novel, in turn based loosely upon Homer's epic the Odyssey, weighs in at around a thousand pages, Strick's vision of Dublin is rendered in a mere 132 minutes. And yet Strick captures much of the vitality and texture of Joyce's story. Perhaps rightly termed "unfilmable" in terms of its length and wordiness, Fred Haines faithful adaptation and Strick's neatly composed scenes suggest that Joyce's cinematic eye was at work, framing and editing, as he constructed his story. Elizabeth Griffin |
