Nora

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Nora is a 2000 biopic based on the biography of the same name by Brenda Maddox, detailing the life of Nora Barnacle Joyce, wife of the controversial yet lauded Irish writer, James Joyce.

It’s taken me so long to get to this one because I didn’t initially realize this movie was based on a specific biography. And because of the arbitrary rules I set for myself at the beginning of this project, if there’s a “based on [book]” in the credits for the movie, I have to read that book before I can watch the movie. And it turns out that Nora by Brenda Maddox seems to be out of print. There is no shortage of secondhand hard copies available online for cheap, so I bought one of those, then I had to wait for it to get here, then I actually had to sit and read the damn thing.

Suffice to say, I was not a fan. I do not doubt the staggering amount of research Maddox had to do to write the book, nor do I doubt her admirable motives for writing it. But I found it an absolute chore to get through. Though Maddox states that she took care not to put words in anyone’s mouth unless she had sufficient proof to do so, she constantly blurs the line between Joyce’s life and his work. And that is admittedly a difficult boundary to maintain with a semiautobiographical writer like Joyce, but I still felt more like I was reading a critic projecting their shallow interpretations onto Joyce’s work rather than reading a biography of his wife.

I can appreciate that Maddox found herself in a difficult position on this project, since not many of Nora’s firsthand words survive in comparison to Joyce’s, but I felt the book could have been an essay instead of four hundred seventy-two pages of the most dry, disjointed, repetitive pages I’ve ever read, including the appendix.

In comparison, even though the movie isn’t anything particularly special, I enjoyed it much more. I think it was very smart to not attempt to adapt either Nora’s or Joyce’s lives from beginning to end, as the book more or less did, but focused on the closest thing to a self-contained story within their relationship.

The movie only concerns itself with the first part of their lives together, approximately the first ten years or so. It portrays Nora and Joyce’s first meeting and their near-immediate decision to run away to Italy together. Despite their intense sexual attraction to each other, their relationship is strained as Nora realizes she is essentially trapped in a foreign country and is completely dependent on a man who refuses to marry her and whom she does not actually really know. Joyce’s paranoia, jealousy, and alcoholism take their toll, as well as Nora’s refusal to read his work. She considers leaving him and returning home to Ireland before they ultimately make the decision, again, to choose each other.

Ewan McGregor served as a co-producer on this movie. I’m not certain how much influence he had over the project as a whole, but I know he was an excellent choice to play James Joyce. After reading A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man as well as Maddox’s Nora, I feel like I know more about Joyce than I ever cared to, and I honestly don’t know if I’ll ever attempt to read any of his other works. I find the man personally detestable. Ewan is very much aware of Joyce’s faults, vacillating between jealous rages and boyish neediness, but he also brings his usual charm. When things are good, it’s believable enough that Nora is deeply attracted to him. After all, whomst among us would not risk it all for a young Ewan McGregor?

Susan Lynch as Nora is the real star, though. She breathes life into a woman who, despite Maddox’s best efforts, often seemed flat on the pages of her biography. Between Ewan’s charm and the societal rules that more or less trapped Nora after her initial decision to run away with Joyce, it’s understandable that Nora didn’t try harder to leave him. But with Susan Lynch’s performance, it’s impossible to imagine Joyce ever abandoning Nora. She’s wry, she’s funny, she’s tough, she’s beautiful, she’s warm, but she never minces her words.

The costumes are beautiful. Nora was known to be fashionable no matter her financial situation, and Joyce was not when Nora was not dressing him, and the costume department took that to heart. There were little details I noticed, like Joyce wearing white shoes that look comfortable but clash with his outfit during the scene where he first meets Nora. I also appreciated Nora’s period-accurate body hair. That’s such a little thing that productions usually decide to ignore. I was really glad that they neither shied away from the Joyces’ sexual attraction to each other, nor did they decide to make Nora’s body more in line with modern beauty standards.

I am glad they decided to gloss over the worst of the infamous dirty letters and the most unholy acts that took place in the Joyces’ bedroom. Jesus. I’m not for censorship by any means, and I hate to kinkshame dead people, but also I am firmly on the side of the debate that thinks those letters never should have been published. I don’t think they would have wanted me to know. I definitely didn’t want to know. I didn’t ask.

In the end, after all this turbulence, Nora and Joyce meeting and silently taking each others’ arms, a mirror of their first date, was the kind of understated scene the written biography could not give me. For all its painstaking research and struggle to stick to what few black-and-white facts we know of Nora Joyce, the book failed to convey hers and Joyce’s complex relationship in a way I found compelling. The movie succeeds in that. Their relationship was hard. There were many reasons why one or both of them perhaps should have walked away. But neither of them did. It’s all too easy for those of us on the outside to understand why it shouldn’t have worked. But the movie seems to know that we can never understand why exactly they kept choosing each other, apart from the simple fact that, in spite of everything, they loved each other. And that, occasionally, is enough. Sometimes, that really is all you need.

COMING UP NEXT: ANNO DOMINI