An Epic Failure

EVERY SO OFTEN, an epically bad film reaches the screen (indeed, usually just one screen) which is guaranteed to drive one out of the theater within 40 minutes, the approximate time it takes to finish your popcorn and pop. Yes, five dollars is wasted, but it's no use throwing good time after bad money. And bad money it is that is paid for a showing of James Joyce's Women.

How bad is this movie? Imagine yourself at an Adams House party, and listening the entire evening to the emphatically casual dropping of supposedly famous artsy names. This movie is hardly more subtle in its eagerness to describe Hemingway's galoshes and Proust's knowledge of South American parrots.

Or perhaps imagine yourself in grade school, when you took eager delight in asking your teacher to define "adultery" or "orgasm." This movie is slightly less mature in its earnestness over only marginally dirty words. Or perhaps move up to high school, when even elementary literary explications might have still sounded somewhat profound. Now imagine that elementary, lecturing tone describing what's obvious to you about Mr. Joyce, and you have James Joyce's Women.

This film advertises itself as an "erotic masterpiece," and if you believe that, I got some real estate in Belfast to sell you. An artsy erotic movie should have some element of the human form artistically displayed somewhere in those crucial first 40 minutes. Instead, there are lots of sea coasts and flying birds. Jonathan Livingston Seagull will go into ecstasy, but humans are in for a hell of a disappointment.

Indeed, within those first 40 minutes a film should show some sort of action, instead of narrating the plot while people walk around on the beach. The movie assumes a silly call and answer format, with Joyce's wife telling what happened, followed by a two second flash of some actor doing or saying the exact same thing that Joyce's wife told us he would, kind of like an instant replay.

Who is Fionnula Flanagan, and how does she have the audacity to write, produce, and star in her own movie when she has the talent for none of these things? Why, furthermore, did Burgess Meredith (alias The Penguin) direct this play in New York, and why did it run longer than two days? And most of all, why does Flanagan insist on showing off her bestockinged legs, when there is so little to show off? These questions, like many Irish mysteries, can only be answered by some form of blarney, of which there is also plenty in this film.

Perhaps one might think this viewpoint too harsh and wish to venture forth on the dreaded path to this film. Well, all I can say is, Godspeed m'lad or lass, you had better hurry to catch this one, and if you can stomach more than 40 minutes of this garbage, you're a better man or lady than I.