Word: bloomed
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
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...