More vintage photos turn up in a routine Internet search than in this film.
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James Joyce was born in suburbia, but he became the ultimate urban legend: a writer so associated with Dublin that statues of him and celebrations still adorn the largest city in Ireland. And this was despite living most of his adult life as a self-imposed exile in Paris and Switzerland.
Though he did not join his countrymen William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, and Seamus Heaney in the Nobel Prize circle, Joyce remains one of the most internationally famous Irish writers whose fame rests on four books: the short-story collection Dubliners (1914), the semi-autobiographical novella A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), his hard-to-read masterwork Ulysses (1922), and the controversial Finnegans Wake (1939), which was published just two years before he died.
Joyce came from a family of 10 children and was educated by the Jesuits, had to quit because his alcoholic father drank the family's money away, then studied at University College in Dublin, became interested in theater and voice, met and married a young woman from Galway, and began a life of travel and exile. Though "James Joyce: So This is Dyoublong" is billed as "an in-depth look into the life and works of one of Ireland's most famous authors," it's really a rather superficial treatment. Much of the film's 40 minutes is squandered on interpretive Joyce-related monologues performed by David Norris, the writer of this screenplay who dons a fedora and sunglasses and does walk-and-talks, stand-and-talks, and sit-and-talks as he leads viewers on a virtual walking tour of Joyce sites. This in itself wouldn't be bad, but Norris, a Joyce scholar who's now an Irish Senator, speaks so quickly and has such a thick Irish accent that he's hard to understand. And what you do manage to grasp seems much more fragmented and superficial than you'd have hoped for in a documentary this brief.
As if the walk-and-talks weren't enough, we also get numerous clips of Norris performing like Hal Holbrook in a one-man stage show. Except for a 1962 black-and-white film clip showing legendary Lost Generation bookseller Sylvia Beach talking on-camera about how she came to publish Ulysses, the first seven or so minutes rely totally on current-day footage of Paris and Dublin and Norris's rambling monologue. Would that there were more in the way of that rare Beach document, but for a biographical film there's really not as much archival material showing Joyce as one might expect. The preponderance of images are of contemporary Paris and Dublin and Senator Norris doing his thing. And the filmmakers don't do us any favors when they set him in a room that's almost empty, and his already hard-to-understand voice begins to sound more hollow and lost in that big room.
There's some information here, as when Joyce's first publisher at the last minute declined to publish Dubliners because it used the names of real businesses and overused the offensive term "bloody," but moments like that only serve to remind you that there ought to be more information packed into this brief documentary. This has more the feel of a tribute than a biography, with various actors talking about their reaction to Joyce--when what I (and I'm assuming other viewers) really want is more facts and visuals about the author and his life. So much of what's included seems random--as when we get a clip of a film crew shooting "Nora" (2000). And yet, out of that segment comes a line allegedly spoken by Nora to her husband that, again, makes us wonder why there aren't more like it in this film: "Jim," we're told she said to him, "why don't you write books that people can read?"
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