Ulysses
Did you know that there was a 1967 film of James Joyce’s ultra-modernist epic Ulysses? I certainly didn’t, not until I read the book and immediately went “man, they could never make that into a film.” But they did.
The novel Ulysses follows the perambulations of a number of characters through a single day in Dublin, 1904, focusing on the movements, thoughts, memories, and desires of Leopold Bloom, a middle-aged man in the midst of a difficult marriage, and Stephen Dedalus, a young schoolteacher and scholar. Nothing happens in the novel, and yet everything does, as we’re privy to the characters’ meandering consciousnesses, their desires, and fears through extended stream-of-consciousness narrative and shifting among genres, including epic poetry and philosophic dialogue. The book is a weighty, confusing, profound narrative, often considered the ultimate modernist novel. How, then, to make this 800 page behemoth into a coherent film?
Remarkably, Joseph Strick’s film Ulysses maintains an interesting and coherent through narrative without sacrificing much of the novel’s substance. Rather than attempting to approximate the extensive stream-of-consciousness monologues that permeate the book, the film makes use of snippets of Joyce’s prose (spoken in voiceover) over montage sequences that visually demonstrate the purport of the language. It focuses stringently on a few main characters, cutting out large swaths of other narrative, and develops the apparent “cuckoldry” of Bloom (Milo O’Shea), the intellectual fever of Stephen (Maurice Roeves), and the passions of Bloom’s wife Molly (Barbara Jeffords), who provides the most extensive voiceover passage.
While the film is forced to pass over a number of the book’s fascinating sequences to keep to the two hour run- time, the viewer is left with a sense of both confusion and profundity, as the ephemeral nature of the single day gives way not to resolution but to a deeper understanding of the characters’ all too human problems. The film does the impossible: it manages to express some portion of Joyce’s pageantry without becoming trite or simplistic.
