Ewan McGregor may play James Joyce, but this awkwardly haunting film belongs, as the title suggests, to Susan Lynch's Nora Barnacle. Pat Murphy's long-planned adaptation of Brenda Maddox's book about the writer and his mistress/muse leaves us in no doubt as to where the power lay in their fraught relationship. The defining moment comes when Nora, having eloped with Joyce to Trieste and realised how unreliable he is, straddles his sleeping form. "F*** up, love," she commands. And he does. In every sense of the phrase. Repeatedly.
Murphy's film covers 10 years of fecklessness, passion and recrimination in this uneasy, unequal partnership, from first meeting in 1904 to the belated publication of Joyce's Dubliners in 1914. Rather than explore Joyce's writing, Murphy probes the domestic chaos that inspired it. Nora was the resilient backbone to Joyce's creativity: she responded to his obsessive carnality and need for dominance, and endured his snobbery, jealousy and unreliability. It's entirely appropriate to history, then, if not to audience satisfaction, that Lynch acts McGregor off the screen.
Our Ewan, once famed for his cheeky chappie manner and his willingness to flash his wedding tackle, is positively understated here. His Joyce is a coward, cowering behind a moustache that looks like a small comb stuck to his lip. We have to accept the word of his brother Stanislaus that Joyce is a genius, and in the several sex scenes, it's Lynch's Nora who comes over as the unbridled one. With her strong features, her thicket of sable hair, and that angry, sensual wound of a mouth, she commands, even when McGregor's Joyce sends their two children away so he can nudge Nora towards an affair with his Italian publisher. Her lines, generally, are far more lyrical than his.
This is the first full production to issue from McGregor's company Natural Nylon, and it's a curious affair. It trades on Joyce's fame while denigrating him and celebrates Nora's spirit in relation to the failings of her famous partner. The result is a weirdly compelling love story, but the technical side of Murphy's production throws up its own problems. Even at their most poverty-stricken, the Joyces are well turned-out: he in immaculate linen, she in a succession of extravagant hats. The scenes in Trieste have the phoney air of studio sets - the lone crowd scene a measure of a meagre £9 million budget. The washed-out colour sometimes suggests that the film was shot in a photo booth.
Ultimately, though, Murphy is right to go for narrow focus, considering Nora and "poor, simpleminded Jim" as individuals rather than literary figures or representatives of their culture and time. There is a refreshing absence of Catholic guilt from this story of two Irish rebels, and Dublin in 1904 seems a city ripe for leaving. Nora is a flawed, peculiar piece of cinema, and one has to ask whether Murphy's dedicated, nine-year slog to bring it to the screen was worth it. On balance - for Lynch's performance if not for McGregor's - I'd say, yes, it was.
Nora
Cert: cert15
