Well, you have to applaud writer/director Sean Walsh’s audacity. To take on James Joyce’s Ulysses – a gargantuan, labyrinthine literary game of a book – is either stupendously brave or supremely foolhardy. It can’t be the latter, for having spent eleven years bringing this project to fruition, Mr. Walsh has had ample time to both reflect on the madcap nature of his venture and lovingly craft his screenplay. And my goodness, it shows.
Bloom is a guileful distillation of its source which outshines Joseph Strick’s 1967 adaptation and absolutely nails any number of the book’s major preoccupations – the obsession with rambling around 1914 Dublin which underpins the entire narrative, the difficult birth of post-colonial Irish identity, the related sense of emasculation, the impact of culture upon consciousness – you name it, and it’s palpable in this suitably heady, bawdy, intellectual, wordy, decadent, surreal brew.
Of course, there’s necessarily been the kind of culling one would normally associate with a vicious outbreak of foot and mouth. Much material has been discarded (which does make me wonder why so much time is given over to the Nighttown sequence – not that its wacky, dominatrix-obsessed content isn’t fun and all) yet commendably, tremendous care has been taken to include as many of Ulysses’ renowned incidents as possible. Indeed, Bloom frequently plays like a top-notch Greatest Hits compilation.
Inevitably, there are problems. Ulysses didn’t get a rep for being unfilmable without good reason, and Bloom doesn’t quite escape its sprawling modernist shadow. Parts – particularly certain scenes with Stephen Dedalus (O’Conor) – seem overly theatrical, though to be fair, they’re merely replicating the character’s tendency toward magnificently pretentious pondering. There’s also enough reliance on voice-over to likely give screenwriting guru Robert McKee a fatal heart-attack.
The performances, thankfully, provide ample compensation for these unavoidable pitfalls. Rea’s Leopold Bloom is simultaneously mournful and unquenchable, but as with the book, it’s his missus that steals the show. Angeline Ball is simply staggeringly good as Molly. She wraps her big, gorgeous, sensual mouth around every ‘yes’ and blazes through every second of screen-time.
Even if such attractions don’t have everybody exclaiming ‘I will yes’, Bloom will definitely and rightly find an audience among the Bloomsday brigade, and it’ll also double up nicely as a spoofer’s guide to Joyce’s tome. Especially, I suspect, for those people intimidated by the thought of actually reading Ulysses (hey, it’s not that mystifying – you turn the page and you move your eyeballs from left to right – you can do it, honest…) but still determined to pull smart people in rumpy bustles or panama hats come June 16.

113 mins. cert 18. out now