‘Bloom’ brings ‘Ulysses’ to the masses

This year’s event, the 11th since the founding of the theater, was held last week at the Director’s Guild of America on Manhattan’s West 57th Street, and, in a departure from the usual stage format, the Rep presented the New York premiere of Sean Walsh’s new feature film “Bloom”. Based on James Joyce’s “Ulysses”, and launched with exquisite timing as the centenary celebrations for Bloomsday gain momentum, “Bloom” is a labor of love for producer/director Walsh. The film was 10 years in the making, three years longer than it took Joyce to write the book. The difficulty of raising funds to make a film from a work regarded as daunting and, possibly, unfilmmable, occupied the director during this time as much as the more delicate business of adapting the revered text to celluloid-friendly format. “Ulysses” has proved notoriously difficult in the past to transfer from page to screen, and the only completed version to date remains Joseph Strick’s sprawling attempt from 1967, starring Milo O’Shea in the Leopold Bloom role. Joyce’s recurring use of unpunctuated stream-of-consciousness by his three principal characters lends itself more readily to a radio-drama format than a cinematic treatment, and Strick’s film quickly surrenders all visual ambition as it reduces to a monotonous lineup of talking heads and voice-overs. Despite legendary film critic Pauline Kael’s acerbic dismissal of Strick’s film as “readings from the book, illustrated by slides?” the “Ulysses” script was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Adapted Screenplay category.
Undaunted by Strick’s failure to bring the book to life on screen, Walsh’s objective in tackling the Joyce tome is a noble one: to deliver Joyce’s masterpiece to a mainstream audience, by highlighting its broad comedy and robust use of Dublin language. A chart-topper on numerous 20th century fiction best-of lists compiled by critics around the globe, “Ulysses” remains a book more often bought than read, and Walsh resolved to wrestle the book from the academics and give it back to the ordinary people for whom, he feels, Joyce intended it.
Walsh’s project attracted a stellar cast in the form of Stephen Rea as Leopold Bloom, the peripatetic Dublin ad-canvasser, and former Commitment Angeline Ball as his salacious soprano wife, Molly. Joseph O’Conor, who delivered an impressive debut performance as a child actor in “My Left Foot” playing the young Christy Brown, takes on the role of the young writer, Stephen Dedelus, Joyce’s fictional alter ego. The fourth major character, the city itself, has changed so dramatically from Joyce’s 1904 that we see little more than glimpses of the built fabric of Dublin during Bloom’s ambling odyssey. Walsh’s efforts to externalize the interior monologues of his characters and take them out onto the cobbled streets and granite pavements of the city center are hampered by the dramatic physical changes of the Celtic Tiger years — the camera must of necessity be blinkered to exclude the satellite dishes, plate glass office buildings, and SUV’s of a 21st century city of that has ceased to be itself and looks more like any other city, anywhere else.
Clocking in at a tidy running time of under two hours, “Bloom” is a lean distillation of the high points of the unwieldy text, and should fulfill Walsh’s ambition to spur Joyce-dodgers to take the book down from the shelf, dust it off, and read it right to the end this time. Walsh is still looking for a U.S. theater distribution deal, but the film will be available on video and DVD from MTI Home Video beginning Aug. 24. To commemorate the Bloomsday centenary, screenings will be held in Boston, Chicago and Sarasota, Fla., on June 16. And if you miss it this year, “Bloom” will undoubtedly make a reappearance next year and every year thereafter around mid-June, as a perennial component of the Bloomsday celebrations.