Word: blooms
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...traditional narrative prose. Viewpoints shift suddenly from one character to the next; punctuation is abandoned; there is no coherent sequence of time and events. One of the most unique elements of the novel is the elaborate stream of consciousness Joyce infuses into Stephen Dedalus and Leopold and Molly Bloom--even the slightest external stimuli summon up old memories, excite new thoughts, and create wild patterns of free association...
...film, unable to cope with the expansive length of Joyce's tour de force, concentrates on three of its most important sections: the separate appearances of Dedalus and Bloom and their subsequent meeting; their romp through Nighttown, Dublin's Combat Zone; and the concluding soliloquy of Molly Bloom. Despite the fact that the film switches the novel's setting to Dublin in the mid-sixties, it remains tolerably faithful to the spirit of the original. But it lacks Joyce's intensity; it can go no further than the flat visual presentation of events (particularly inadequate) since Joyce--almost blind--evoked...
...film also destroys some of Joyce's most subtle and suggestive writing--the visuals are just too blatant. In the middle of the film there is a short scene in which Bloom--a cuckold--rubs himself into erotic rapture against a wall while looking up the dress of an obliging young woman. Fireworks are going off in midday, but there is no other sound save Bloom's heavy breathing. The scene goes to quickly and the camera cannot pause long enough to capture the full force of Joyce's sensual prose...
Fordham Freshman. Mostel shambles and capers and preens through Bloom's transformations-a Circe's hog, transvestite, martyr, hero of the people-with an air of dignified amazement. However, this is a muted Mostel, and somehow he is not enough. Whether the problem lies in trying to capture Joyce onstage or in Burgess Meredith's direction, there are long moments of curious lifelessness, a kind of listless anarchy, the stage business often as flyaway as the Joycean allusions...
Somehow the crucial father-son theme connecting Bloom and Stephen never emerges very clearly. Maybe Vatican II is to blame for drawing the poison out of the old Catholic guilts, but Tom Lee Jones' Stephen, in his wild Irish despair, seems no more interesting than a sullen Fordham freshman on a St. Patrick's Day drunk...