Poor Likeness

By R.S.

A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN

Directed by Joseph Strick

Screenplay by Judith Rascoe

Sober. Earnest. Respectful. And, alas, excruciating. There is really little more to be said about Joseph Strick's adaptation of the James Joyce masterpiece. The novel may be this century's greatest restatement of that endlessly fascinating story of a youth in revolt against family, society, culture, religion--everything that formed him. But of course it is not the familiar tale Joyce told, but the manner in which he told it, that compels one's attention and awe. And there is simply no way to construct a film that can contain more than a suggestion of the verbal richness of a novel. Interior monologues lose their power when they are transformed into voice-overs or dialogue scenes. Those long, obsessive scenes in which Stephen Dedalus flexes his revolutionary's muscles in aesthetic and theological debate with school friends become strangely wooden when, instead of reading them on the printed page, we are forced to watch actors trying to speak these abstractions with realistic spontaneity. As for Joyce's famous epiphanies, they seem disastrously flat on the screen, at least in this adap tation. It falls to John Gielgud to deliver the most famous of them, a priest's vivid description of the torments of hell. He speaks the words well enough, his precise diction giving them something like the burning power of dry ice. But in the truncated form the screen demands, they lose much of their power. Strick helps not at all with his dismally conventional way of shooting.

Indeed, if translating Joyce to film appears, on the face of it, an impossible (and perhaps unnecessary) dream, it also seems that Strick, whose camera technique may be charitably described as primitive, is the wrong man to attempt the task. More than a decade ago, he gave us a Ulysses that suffered from the same dull defects. But there are, at least some inherently cinematic aspects to that novel, and the director's defects did not appear quite so plainly. In Portrait it becomes clear that Strick cannot even handle straightforward dramatic scenes energetically and forcefully. Nor is he very good with actors. Bosco Hogan, who looks the part of Stephen, cannot find the wit, rage and irony that are there to be mined, and no one else is permitted to explode emotionally either. The result is a film without drive, lilt or vision. Portrait is an academic reading of a classic, faithful in its way to the overall structure of the original, but entirely lacking in the spirit that makes it live.

-- R.S.

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