Product: Nora [VHS] (2000)
Rating: 2.0
Well-Intentioned Film, But Failed to Capture the Heart
Writers' life fascinates moviemakers. We had "Tom and Viv" dealing with T S Eliot; and recently "Total Eclipse," too. Now we have a story of James Joyce and his wife Nora.To be precise, Nora was not legally a wife during the time of her life the film depicts (though much later they married in 1931), but the point is clear. The film is about Nora, strong-willed woman whose presence is supposed to influence the life of Joyce, and vice versa. And her name happens to remind us of Ibsen's heroine. As to describing a strong woman in a male-dominating time and place, the film succeeds, thanks to Susan Lynch's deft performance, which vividly realizes the invincible will of a woman whose presense tends to be overshadowed by the great writer of the 20th century.However, the flaws of the film seem to obliterate its merits. The greatest problem is that we are not allowed to know much about the nature of the relationships between Joyce and Nora. In short, what part of Joyce, a man, attracted her so much? During the tempestuous relationships between the two leads, there is few key-moment that accounts for the intense love-hate emotional ride between them; so, we watch they love, they fight, they part, and they reconcile, but no development of the characters is seen. Consequently, the film looks too episodic; sporadically engages our mind, but jumps to the next scene without a reasonable step of the story. It is regrettable, because there is still interesting facts that are introduced during the film -- for example, Joyce briefly was involved in movie theater business -- but these facts are soon forgotten, never fully explained. What is worse, Joyce's complex relationships with Ireland, which should never be ignored when we talk about him, fails to be fully explored in spite of the good use of period costume and location. The couple leave Ireland to go to Italy, the film surely shows, but you cannot describe an image of Joyce, who had deep, complicated feelings towards Ireland, without convincingly showing the cultural difference between the two countries. The last point is the weakest part of "Nora."I think Ewan McGregor is not bad though fans of Joyce might think otherwise, considering him a little miscast. After all, life of a writer is a difficult topic to handle: on screen you have to convince yourself as a writer while we audience usually don't have any knowledge about what kind of a guy a writer could be. We can imagine soldiers, lawyers, even spies, but the image of a writer is at best, very vague. Moreover, as for the film in point, Ewan Mcgregor has already established his image in "Episode I" and Joyce himself also has established his own. I admire moviemakers' courage to tackle this topic, but still the film leaves much to be desired.