good acting...bad plot

I think to fully appreciate the movie, the viewer needed to know and read James Joyce's pivotal works. Because I had read Joyce's <i>A Portrait of An Artist as a Young Man</i> and <i>Ulysses</i> during my college years (too long ago), I was able to understand some of the conflict. In fact, it gave me a deeper appreciation for Joyce, whome I never really cared for. The movie helped me see how conflicted and neurotic he was. It also showed how cuckholded he was, too. I thought it was interesting to see some of the books' imagery assert itself in the movie; it helped me understand the books a bit more. I am thankful for that! Maybe all that reading in college was good for me after all even though I hated it at the time!

I sort of get what you mean. They kept getting into a good place and then he would mess it all up, and then it would get good again, and he would mess it all up again, and so on. It did seem to end where it began, but I think that was sort of the point. I don't believe I've ever read anything by him, though I might have, because I do read a lot.

He seemed to be one of those people that can't let things just be fine. If things are getting too good, he has to accuse Nora of cheating, or drink enough to where he can't walk, or quit his job. I've known people like that. I'm like that to certain extent. I think most people are. It seemed to me that the point of the story is that life goes on, that Nora loved him so much that she just kept putting up with it, and that he loved her so much that he kept coming back and trying to make things right, even though he would only mess it up again.

This was one of those films that you can't just sit down and watch without researching the background.

I am very familiar with James Joyce's private life, and I have read his novels, short stories, poetry, and private letters to Nora.

I loved this film, I thought it was intensely stifling, like her marriage. I felt the oppressiveness that Nora endured, an oppressiveness that most literary scholars thought she never endured.

Nora is generally thought of as a lower-class woman whose sexual forthrightness offered Joyce a positive outlet during a strenuous, oppressive time in his writing career. Being uneducated, she was not thought to have read his writings, and therefore she was the one person who supposedly didn't criticize his work.

This film shows a Nora whose open sexuality scares her husband into insecurity and paranoia, a Nora who is equal to her husband intellectually (despite her lack of an education), and a Nora who openly criticizes Joyce's writings (during a time when he needed praise).

Joyce is perceived as neurotic (because of his novels), and this film explores the roots of his neuroticism. It shows him as a dirty, jealous, voyeur.

His first novel Ulysses was rejected by publishing companies, and banned, for many years. The style he used was ingenious, brand-new, untried, anti-literary. Because of this, he was completeley criticized, condemned, and cancelled out by the literary world.

Today, his novel Finnegans Wake, along with Ulysses, is considered one of the greatest novels ever written, and Joyce's novels are considered the hardest to read. His mind worked a million miles a minute, he was a genius.

I would have liked for the film to depict more of Joyce as a child growing up, but this film is based on a biography about Nora herself, and more or less follows Nora's own point of view.

I thought this movie was excellent, but for fans of Joyce's work more than anything else. I found it to be really well researched and nuanced. For instance, you get Joyce's brother's (Stanislaus) attraction to Nora subltly represented in a scene where Nora is breast-feeding Giorgio--something that helps explain the tension and the bond between the brothers. The depiction of the intense sexual relationship between them is also very accurate and pulls no punches; the exchange of letters when Joyce revisits Dublin trying to establish its first cinema, while Nora is left at home is wonderfully accurate. [And if you think these letters are ribald, page through some of the other letters.] I found Pat Murphy's dedication to the complexity of this relationship to be extremely praiseworthy and to wonderfully incorporate Joyce's work into what is essentially Nora's story. Let's not forget that for all of Joyce's neuroses "Ulysses" is set on June 16, 1904--the Joyce fell in love with Nora (i.e., the day of history's most famous handjob) and a testament to his love.
Lynch and M'Gregor are excellent and I think this is probably the best way to capture Joyce--through Nora (as well as herself).

I find it distressing when people use the word "plot" in reference to a true story, even one that is fictionalized.

I also don't think you need to be that familiar with Joyce to appreciate the point of this film. This movie is about Nora, and about the oppression of highly sexual women, even as the men who love and, dare I say, NEED them continue to desire their open attitude about sex. Joyce loved Nora's sexuality, even as it drove him mad. But it was his own insecurities, jealousies and double standards that created the problems. He in one breath despised the church for repressing people and in the next breath accused Nora of being a slut because she was not repressed.

Welcome to the world of the sexual woman. It has, thankfully, gotten better. But, not much.

How extremely revealing the one comment on this board which says this film shows how cuckolded Joyce was. No where in that film did Nora engage in anything sexual with another man. She was appalled at Joyce's attempt to manipulate her into an affair. Yet, in at least one person's perception, she cuckolded him. Because she flirted? Because she'd had sex BEFORE she met Joyce? So, maybe the double standard applied to women has not changed so very much.

Lifelong DBs supporter

Watch yourselves ladies. You'll get wet!