In Bed With Ulysses

[IN BED WITH ULYSSES screens Sunday June 16th at 1:30 pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art.]

Review by Mark Satola

At once maddening and fascinating, Alan Adelson and Kate Taverna's documentary IN BED WITH ULYSSES takes on the task of presenting James Joyce's landmark masterpiece Ulysses as an easily approachable comic romp. Toward that end, they includes extensive footage of a dramatic reading of the novel, directed by Adelson and staged under the title “Bloom” at the Center for Jewish History in New York City, with imported Irish actors giving vivid voice to the multitude of Dublin denizens that Joyce immortalized in his pages. Hearing the words does provide a thread to guide one through the Daedalean maze of Joyce’s innovative language.

Ulysses, however, might prove more daunting to the casual reader than the filmmakers seem to suggest, and this is but one of a number of serious flaws in what could have been a first-rate introduction to “the great novel no one has read.” Adelson and Laverna, in fact, preface their encomium with a sequence of interview snippets in which an array of average sorts admit that they've never read it, or that they’ve never heard of it, or the slender, half-blind genius who wrote it. It’s hard to imagine very many of them having a go at it.