AKA Finnegan’s Wake
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DIRECTED BY: Mary Ellen Bute
FEATURING: Martin J. Kelley, Jane Reilly, Peter Haskell, Page Johnson
PLOT: In a series of disconnected scenes, memories, and dreams, the passing of Finnegan, AKA Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker, AKA HCE (and there may be many other names not yet known) is the occasion of a wake, an event which the deceased keeps attempting to attend despite his survivors’ reluctance for him to participate—or perhaps none of that happens.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: The next time you hear someone complain that their favorite book was adapted for the cinema and the filmmakers weren’t “faithful to the original text,” just plop them down and make them watch this ridiculously successful effort to burnish the original medium through adaptation into a new one. Passages never claims to be a literalization of Joyce’s book, instead recognizing that its greatest advantage is the power of its twisted language and putting that front and center.
COMMENTS: “When is a pun not a pun?” the jolly bartender asks. It’s an unexpectedly galling question, considering that he’s inside a story that consists almost entirely of plays-on-words, that exists solely to celebrate the flexibility and incomprehensibility of language. The nerve of this guy.
James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake, the novel he spent 15 of the last 17 years of his life composing, is enshrined in history as, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, “arguably one of the most complex works of 20th-century English-language fiction.” It makes pretensions to having a narrative, but if it is about anything, it’s about words, words, words, and their notorious malleability. Joyce gives nearly every sentence at least two meanings, exploiting meter and importing similar words from other languages and playing with time to such a degree that the last words of the book form a complete sentence with the first words of the book. It’s a 628-page fairground ride of a novel, and it regularly tops lists like “The 10 Most Difficult Books to Read” and features in stories like “This book club finally finished ‘Finnegans Wake.’ It only took them 28 years.” It’s a monument to inaccessibility. I haven’t read the whole thing. Have you?
So there is enormous praise to be extended to Mary Ellen Bute’s ambitiously foolhardy decision to actually try and visualize Joyce’s wandering scenarios, because it makes the effort of reading the book seem both achievable and desirable. Her film uses an adaptation created by Mary Manning in 1955 staged by the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but while all the language comes directly from Joyce’s text, she makes two key innovations that neither book nor stage could offer. The first is the use of tools of cinema; framing, closeups, and editing keep the language moving and prevent the focus from wandering away, while visuals can create a level of surrealism commensurate with the text. A film that looks like it will be stuck in the hall of the titular funeral party can transform unexpectedly into a burlesque show, while what has been a stagebound production through the halfway point suddenly steps out into nature.
Bute’s second contribution may be even more important: most of the film is subtitled with Joyce’s text, giving the viewer a unique opportunity to both hear and read the language and appreciate the multiple meanings and sneaky substitutions that Joyce has peppered 
throughout the book. (Here, “throughout” should be taken to mean “in every damn sentence.”) You know who would agree? Joyce’s countryman Samuel Beckett, who said of the original book, “You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read—or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something; it is that something itself.” The film version honors this fact, dramatizing Joyce’s maddening doggerel and giving sound and shape to the words so that you cannot miss his fantastical leaps of rhyme and oronym.
It’s nice of Beckett to show up, because in reviewing a pair of films based on the works of this fellow son of the Emerald Isle, I twice made the observation that there was nothing weird about the films that wasn’t already weird in the original plays. One might expect the same to be true of these excerpts from Joyce’s novel, given that scenes have been adapted as faithfully as possible. However, the transition from prose to moving image puts the absurdism into a wholly new context. Film doesn’t just repeat the weirdness of the original; it highlights it. By the end, as HCE marches off into the sun to the strains of composer Elliot Kaplan’s oddly emotion-drenched score, I don’t have any more of an idea of what’s going on than I did at the start, but the urge to explore the puzzle further is invigorating.
WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:
(This movie was nominated for review, in a small bit of wordplay, by “Finnegans Cake”. Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)
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