Ulysses

Joseph Strick's film of Ulysses is wonderful. For those who know, and presumably love, Joyce's novel (our century's greatest long poem to date), it will be enough to say that the film is worthy of its source. Admission prices, unfortunately, exceed the cost of the book, but those who can afford them should pay them.

The film offers an astonishingly thorough and accurate introduction to Joyce, for those who have been too busy or too intimidated to discover him. Everything you hear is Joyce's own language, and Joyce at his best, since the script writers have selected wisely from the book's 800 pages for their two hours of film time. No doubt many viewers will run to the book after witnessing this proof of Joyce's wise hilarity.

I found myself quite skeptical of this film's advance billing. We still think of film, perhaps (even those of us who proclaim loudest its potential for subtlety), as a medium best suited for the rendering of external action, as opposed to the action of the mind. Better to film The Odyssey, we might say, than anything of Joyce's. Strick, however, has perceived that the action of the mind manipulates concrete images, and he has spared no energy in setting up and filming even scenes that flit for a mere second through the capricious minds of his characters.

Much of Ulysses is filmed in conspicuous point-of-view shots, the kind of shot which shows the image that a character in the movie is seeing. A POV shot that makes us aware of its presence can easily seem ostentatious gimmickry on the part of the director, like the shot in Sundays and Cybele where Hardy Kruger holds up a cocktail glass and we see the room through it as he turns. In Ulysses Strick establishes early such an extreme convention of point-of-view narrative that nothing subsequent seems gimmickry. Stephen Daedalus (Maurice Roeves) walks on the beach as we hear his voice speaking the "Ineluctable modality of the visible" interior monologue. When he shuts his eyes our screen goes black until he opens them. Equally well integrated into the film's conventions are certain conspicuous parts of the sound track, as when Leopold Bloom (Milo O'Shea) hears a cuckoo clock chanting "Cuckold! Cuckold! Cuckold!" or some barnyard noises Bloom hears in a tavern, when a greasy slab of meat falls from the gob of a man sitting near him.

Like Joyce, Strick doesn't follow a conventional, chronological narrative line. We are accustomed to flash-backs, but not to such brief flashes as those Strick introduces in his first scene: at the Martello tower, Buck Mulligan says "The aunt thinks you killed your mother," and Stephen sees, and we see, his mother's deathbed, an image that recurs in the drunken hallucinations of Nighttown. Except for Resnais's films, we are not at all accustomed to flash-forwards, and Strick uses them liberally: as Bloom leaves home in the morning, he imagines Blazes Boylan, his wife Molly's lover, leaping at her, as he will that afternoon.

Strick's enormous success at translating the "interior monologue" into images defies, for the most part, any specific analysis of his method. He has simply exercised great perceptivity of the mind's movement--its means of wish-fulfillment fantasizing, its rhythms. But one aspect of his method that can be identified is his use of close-ups. Objects inherently grotesque, though subdued by their everyday contexts, often fill his Panavision screen: fishguts on a butcher's block, kidneys plopping into a cat's dish. The viewer perceives that what might have been a "shock image" in Polanski or Hitchcock has not been used as such, but has been subdued by its context, as such things are in our everyday consciousness.

Those who planned this film first read Joyce quite profoundly. They discovered not only some of his wildest humor, but also his deepest tenderness, and his sense of how quickly the mind, in its movements, can leap from tenderness to humor, or from deep sorrow to humor. They discovered too Joyce's vision of man's hope, the optimistic vitality epitomized by Molly Bloom (Barbara Jefford), the Earth Mother, but well-represented in her husband (the "womanly man") Leopold. In the vital mind of Molly or Leopold, the choice is humor when humor and sorrow coincide. The Blooms opt for Joy: at Paddy Dignam's funeral, Bloom thinks mournfully of his dead son Rudy, dead ten years, in infancy. But his mind begins to calculate what day Rudy was conceived: Thought of death leads to thought of birth. It must have been that time ... Molly standing at the window, watching those dogs at it in the courtyard and that constable grinning up at her: "O c'mon, Poldy. Give us a touch ..." At Dignam's funeral, later, some men are gossiping about Molly ("a good armful she was"), as they file under the towering rows of crosses on the tombs. Joyce's sense of the everpresent union of disparities is well dramatized in Strick's Ulysses.

Critics will never shut up about the beauties of Joyce's fiction, and one could ramble on just as interminably about those beauties that Strick has transplanted intact into his film. But Strick has created beauties more or less on his own, Joycean beauties intensified. The proximity of opposites is dramatized sometimes in his images as they could not be in prose, as when a beautiful girl Bloom ogles on a beach stands and limps off with heartbreaking awkwardness. A row of sandwich men, at another point, file down the street, each wearing one letter of some product's name. The last of them, looking drunk, lags behind, and with him the apostrophe-s that completed the name. The image is hilarious and it would not be excessive to call it an example of Joyce's bemused fascination with philology, his self-consciousness about language, which his own medium could not always represent so strikingly. Likewise, when Molly is contemplating the nature of males, she imagines (and we see) Leopold working some trigonometry problem on a blackboard, attired in mortarboard. He finishes, surveys it smugly, and writes C.O.D. instead of Q.E.D. at the bottom.

Strick, or his scriptwriters, must also be commended for the judicious selection of dialogue fragments here. Often, in Bloom's imaginings, single faces fill the screen as they thunder a brief phrase, then vanish and aren't heard from again. We have seen a bit of this in Lester's The Knack, but how much more delightful to have such phrases be Joyce's, to have instead of "Mods and Rockers!" Theodore Purefoy's faithfully Catholic, "He employs a mechanical device to frustrate the sacred ends of nature!" or to have a solemn diagnostician pronounce. "He was born out of bedlock ... Ambidexterity is also latent," or to have a hallucinated barrister command, "The accused will now rise and make a vulgar statement."

Compressing as he must, Strick inevitably creates certain emphases Joyce does not. He wisely emphasizes Bloom's relationship with Molly, which is certainly the essence of the novel. This, however, tends to exaggerate the relentlessness of Bloom's thoughts on his cuckoldry. More conspicuously exaggerated is Bloom's racial paranoia, his consciousness of anti-semitism around him; but perhaps the problem of anti-semitism took on a different aspect for this film's crew, shooting in 1966, than it had for Joyce in 1922; perhaps it is no longer a sorrow from which we are capable of drawing our thoughts quickly toward joy, and as such looms larger than other sorrows in the fluid context of the film.

The acting in Ulysses is uniformly magnificent, and most of the parts represent triumphs of casting. An Earth Mother is easier to fantasize than to film, but Barbara Jefford looks and acts the part enormously. Maurice Roeves is glamorous to an extent that no reader will have visualized Stephen Daedalus--vaguely Beatle-ish with a matinee idol's jaw--but he speaks Stephen's lines and thoughts with great intelligence.

Joseph Strick has not made many films before Ulysses. One, The Savage Eye, an impressionistic documentary about a lonely divorcee, has been little distributed. Another, The Balcony, is evoked amusingly in the scene of Ulysses which represents the book's Circe episode. In The Balcony Strick was groping energetically, if not successfully, for new film conventions to express Genet's revolutionary theatrical form. In Ulysses he has recreated Joyce's form superbly, has proved himself a great translator. The mind delights in considering the unconventional literary masterpieces he might next adapt. My own first candidate is Tristram Shandy, the eighteenth-century grandfather of Ulysses.