What perversity drives filmmakers to beach themselves on the shores of unfilmable novels, books in which verbal virtuosity and interior monologue take precedence over narrative incident and externalized character development? Producer-director Sean Walsh's 10-year quest to bring James Joyce's monumentally complex Ulysses to the screen is admirable, but the result — which opened on the 100th anniversary of Bloomsday — is watchable, if not particularly cinematic, and faithful without actually evoking the uniquely literary qualities that have seduced generations of readers. The story unfolds over the course of a single day in Dublin, June 16, 1904, almost entirely within the minds of three characters: Insurance agent Leopold Bloom (Stephen Rea), his wife, Molly (Angeline Ball), and struggling young poet Stephen Dedalus (Hugh O'Conor), the protagonist of Joyce's earlier Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Bloom runs errands, attends an old friend's funeral, crosses paths with neighbors and comely girls, and lets his mind wander freely — as though there were any stopping it — through matters trivial and momentous. Molly's faithlessness, his son Rudy's death in infancy and the bittersweet awareness that his 15 year-old daughter, Milly (Jane Valentine), is almost grown dominate Bloom's fully articulated thoughts, but his mind flutters through a jumble of half-formed ideas, fleeting impressions, fantasies and stray scraps of information. Dedalus, who supports himself as a schoolteacher, is estranged from his father, uncertain about his faith and haunted by the circumstances of his mother's death; he loses himself in wide-ranging literary discussions and drink. Molly lazes around the house, musing about the relationships between men and women as filtered through her ripely carnal sensibilities. In their free-associative thought streams, the past and the present, the practical and the fantastic, the sensual, scatological, sacred and profane mingle freely. The acting is exemplary, though O'Conor is a bland Dedalus. That may be due to the character as much as the actor — it's hard for a callow youth, even one standing in for the novel's prodigiously talented author, to compete with a man of Bloom's mature sorrows or a cheerful slattern like Molly, whose famous soliloquy both opens and closes the film. Walsh's adaptation benefits from the fact that material condemned as obscene when Ulysses was written (and left out of Joseph Strick's 1967 ULYSSES) is no longer particularly shocking; Joyce's earthy sensibilities are ill-served by coyness and Walsh's film is nothing if not frank. --Maitland McDonagh
