Most people who have tried it out conclude that James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses is impossible even to read. Adapting the dense, parodic, allusion-wracked, compulsively detailed, 300,000-word book into a movie would seem to be a doubly impossible task. It would require a filmmaker to find movie correlatives for the book's mixture of deadpan third-person narrative, stream-of-consciousness articulation, multiple styles and points of view, and what may be the most vivid depiction of big-city living ever captured between two covers. It would demand a cast of more than 100 speaking parts, extensive, intrusive location shooting in Ireland and Gibraltar, a vast special effects budget, and gigantic set decoration to recreate the Dublin of the early 20th century. Any studio interested in doing Ulysses right would have to take the same kind of gamble New Line Cinema took on its Lord of the Rings adaptation: A $200 million budget and nearly 11 hours of running time (18 hours if you really want to be faithful) on a literary property that has a fanatical but limited fan base.

The probability of this happening is precisely zero. I'd love to see Ulysses fully realized on screen, and even I wouldn't take such a gamble if I were a studio executive. Thus, the Irish filmmaker Sean Walsh has already performed a labor of Hercules by adapting the book into an entertaining, 105-minute picture.

Whether there will be many takers for Walsh's Bloom is a difficult call. In his public comments, the director takes a clearly evangelical stance: He wants to introduce neophytes to a book that is notoriously hard to understand and usually requires a first-time reader to pick up a second book as a guide to what's going on. "Ulysses is regarded as the greatest novel of the 20th century," Walsh writes in an email interview with me, "and yet very few people have actually read it—this was the paradox that appealed to me..."

So far so good. Few books could benefit more from getting prominently into the cultural mainstream, through a variety of media channels. I suspect if the basic plot and ideas of Ulysses were more widely distributed, the book itself would not be seen as significantly less approachable than Hamlet (which would be pretty baffling for anybody who tried to read it without having heard anything about it beforehand) or Paradise Lost (which similarly benefits from having many of its high points enshrined in cultural chitchat) or the Divine Comedy (which even today few people read without a good set of explanatory notes).

Whether there is an audience for such a movie—essentially a companion piece for a book—is not clear. I suspect Walsh may be misfiring in his assumption that there is a critical mass of people who feel any need to have some understanding of Ulysses. Literary modernism is no longer the kind of thing educated people feel much pressure to appear familiar with, and Ulysses is, if anything, at a troubled point in its history—too old and canonical to have much hipster value, but too off-putting to be sold as a comfortable old classic. Finally, this reputedly difficult book has already been adapted into a reputedly difficult movie: Joseph Strick's 1967 Ulysses.

With a modest title, a crisp running time, some costume-picture attractions, and a palatable cast, Walsh does his best to recast Ulysses as a popular entertainment. His Leopold Bloom is played by Stephen Rea, who was an Oscar nominee for 1992's The Crying Game. (And he shoulda won, too! Watch The Crying Game today and you'll see that what looked at the time—to me, at any rate—like a one-trick novelty picture is in fact one of the best movies of the nineties.) Unlike Strick, who got around his limited budget by setting the entire picture in modern-day (1967) Dublin, Walsh spends a generous portion of his $6.1 million budget on recreating a 1904 world of starched collars, crinoline dresses and gaslight. Where Strick's black and white film was heavy on jump cuts and new wave sound editing, and featured a spiky modernist score by Stanley Myers, Walsh plays it relatively smooth. Bloom's aesthetic fits comfortably into the costume-drama genre, and David Kahne's musical score (though it sounds synthesized) draws on easy melodies (snippets from Don Giovanni, the theme from Molly Bloom's signature air "Love's Old Sweet Song," and so on). If Strick's version owed something to the movies of Richard Lester or English kitchen sink cinema of the sixties, Walsh's can compete with today's tonier art-house co-productions.

Critical consensus on Strick's Ulysses has tended toward the view that it is an ill-conceived failure. While I have a high opinion of Strick's version (elevated recently when I watched it for the first time in more than a decade), Bloom boasts some notable advantages. Angeline Ball's Molly Bloom is considerably warmer and better looking than Barbara Jefford's, with consistently smart and spirited line readings, and the decision to have her soliloquy (Ulysses' version of a crowd pleaser) bracket the film works better than I'd have expected. I don't know how tough the competition is in the Irish Film and Television Awards, but I'm confident Ball deserved her win in that contest.

Hugh O'Conor in Bloom plays a more likable Stephen Dedalus than either Maurice Roëves, who did the same part in Strick's Ulysses, or Bosco Hogan, who played it in Strick's 1977 Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. The problem is that Stephen Dedalus is not a particularly likable character. Hogan did a better job of projecting Stephen's intelligence and poetic genius, while Roëves, the macrodontic thespian probably best known for playing Colonel Munro in Michael Mann's The Last of the Mohicans, carried off the stiff, tormented froideur that makes the character both crucial and problematic in Ulysses.

Many of the secondary characters are well done here. Patrick Bergin, who plays "The Citizen" in the new version, lacks the flabby, worn dissoluteness Geoffrey Golden gave the same role in 1967, but he's memorably harsh and menacing. On the whole I prefer Walsh's chinless Lenehan (Paul Ronan) over Strick's (Robert Somerset).

Alvaro Lucchesi, who plays Buck Mulligan in Bloom, does a better job of filling out the famous adjective "plump" than did the svelte T.P. McKenna in Strick. (McKenna does have an intriguing career path in Joyce dramatizations, however: Having played Stephen's good-for-nothing friend in Ulysses, he went on to play Stephen's father ten years later in Portrait.) Lucchesi is a merrier figure, but neither actor sufficiently captures Mulligan's charm and charisma. It was an important dramatic move for Joyce to make Mulligan a superficially more attractive figure than Stephen: Among other things, it creates an analogy for Molly's finding the worthless Blazes Boylan more seductive than her own husband.

Walsh makes more of an effort to bring out some of the stylistic texture in the "Gerty MacDowell" chapter, wherein a young woman puts on an impromptu seaside peep show while Bloom masturbates. In the book, this chapter gets its punch and comedy from being written in a parody of the sentimental style of Maria Susanna Cummins' 19th century bestseller The Lamplighter. Without the parody, the sexual episode just seems strange and unmotivated. While I don't think either movie carries off this scene very successfully, Bloom paints a fuller picture of Gerty's romantic and religious delusions.

Strick's contemporary setting of the book, I think, turns out to have been his smartest move. It allowed him to take full advantage of the city's bustle and animation. The book Ulysses teems with the sights, sounds and smells of a second-tier metropolis. Walsh's Bloom, which has to provide period decoration and continuity on a modest budget, seems to take place in a city as unpopulated as Nagasaki. Where are all the extras in these cityscapes? A quiet Ulysses is for me more jarring than a Ulysses with automobiles in place of horse-drawn carriages.

It's strange that neither film makes much use of subjective camerawork. I would be inclined to shoot the peripatetic early chapters as much as possible from Bloom's own point of view, with handheld shots, zooms, and the full vocabulary of verité technique. Some scenes, such as Bloom's stilted conversation with Mr. M'Coy (in which he impatiently passes pleasantries with an acquaintance while thinking about other subjects and trying to keep an eye on an attractive woman across the street) would seem to demand such an approach—though as it happens this scene has been dropped in both films. Walsh is a bit more aggressive in using montage and insert shots (in addition to voice-over narration) to depict the stream of consciousness.

"Ithaca," the penultimate chapter, written in a parody of the question-and-answer form of the old Catechism of the Catholic Church, gets differently treated by Strick and Walsh. Strick goes to some lengths to reproduce the chapter's style and esoteric subject matter. Walsh dispenses with the narration entirely, with a very brief sequence in which Bloom and Stephen meet up and have a friendly chat. The book allows for some ambiguity about just how friendly this meeting really is, and some readers conclude that Stephen ends up going on his way because he's bored with Bloom and anxious to get away from him. I like Walsh's take and agree with the view that the two share a genuine father/son encounter, but again, absent the style, the action seems flat. In judging between the two films, I'll call this one a push.

As everybody familiar with Ulysses knows, the "Circe" or "Nighttown" chapter is the book's high point—in story (featuring several important plot resolutions), in length (4965 lines in the Gabler edition), in characterization (though much of the supposed "psychology" in the chapter is clearly a lark, "Circe" is essential in establishing Bloom's, Stephen's and Molly's internal conflicts), and in comedy (this chapter contains some of the funniest material ever put on a page). In my dream version of Ulysses, more than half of that $200 million budget would go to getting the absurd, hallucinatory dream play in "Circe" right. So neither movie truly captures more than a fraction of the climactic chapter.

Whatever we may make of this description of a "fullnosed" and "olive" Jewish matron, the impression is clearly of a large, masculine woman. The description is not incidental, since the chapter's high point involves a dual sex change in which a male Bella humiliates and abuses a female Bloom. This is rich material for sight gags. In Strick's Ulysses, Bella is played by Anna Manahan, a large, loud, strident performer who hits the right tone of a ringmaster. In Bloom, Bella is Maria Lennon, a severe beauty who plays the character in unironic dominatrix fashion. What should be an alternately jolly and horrific scene comes across as serious and creepy. It's a misstep from which Bloom doesn't recover.

I have a collection of fan quibbles, but there are few things more tiresome than listening to a fan list heresies in an adaptation. Ultimately, any version of Ulysses stands or falls on the quality of its Bloom, and here again, I think Strick's version comes out ahead. Stephen Rea gets to shine in the flights of fancy in "Circe," and he revivifies some of the character's sadness and pathos (appropriately, since the popular view of Ulysses as a joyous affirmation of life may be ceding some ground these days to the old view of the book as a darker, more pathetic story). But in general Rea plays the book's hero in a mopey, hangdog manner that drains away much of the fun. What keeps readers sticking with Ulysses is that its central character is alert, witty and engaging. If Bloom doesn't keep you entertained, you're not long for Ulysses.

For this reason, Milo O'Shea remains the Bloom to beat. I've heard the legitimate complaint that the beetle-browed O'Shea, truly a man with the map of Ireland on his face, looks about as Jewish as Barry Fitzgerald. But O'Shea plays the character with nuance and mental energy. His Bloom is compassionate and realistic, fetishistic and genteel, friendly and reserved. While I think John Astin as Gomez Addams remains history's greatest marriage of an actor and a role, it's hard to imagine anybody doing a more perfect Bloom than O'Shea.

When I asked Walsh what kind of Ulysses movie he would have made with the same budget and running time Peter Jackson had for the Rings trilogy, he said, "I would be richer but the film would be poorer!" While that's an admirably philosophical response, I still think a definitive version of the book is conceivable, and is probably the only kind of adaptation that's really worth doing: It's the details, nuances, and stylistic shifts, not the thin, mundane plot, that make Ulysses interesting. To dispatch with the book's texture and retain the story is to throw out the baby and keep the bathwater.

But between the two completed movie versions of Ulysses, some sense of the book's flavor and structure emerges: jarring modernity, wistful nostalgia, meticulous construction, exuberant fantasy. The two movies complement each other in important ways: Many sections and even whole chapters missing from one are present in the other. I'm happy to report that, since my Reason article on Bloomsday fans was published, Walsh has secured American distribution (Paragon Film Group and CineMuse for theatrical and MTI Video for DVD). Meanwhile, a DVD version of Strick's Ulysses (no extra features!) has been on the market since 2000, and it would be nice to see some renewed interest in that underappreciated picture.

To a pretty perverse degree, Joyce popularization involves picking over the bones of the author's life story. I have an aunt who has read biographies of both James and Nora Joyce and is planning to read Carol Loeb Shloss's recent Lucia Joyce: To Dance in the Wake, but is convinced she would never be able to make it through Ulysses. Why bother? For the curious but intimidated, either or both of these film adaptations would be a better starting point. We're lucky to have Bloom on its way to the United States.

Before leaving Bloomsday behind, I'd like to put in a good word for Fritzi Horstmann's documentary Joyce to the World. I cannot endorse that title as I believe people discussing Joyce should as much as possible avoid puns and wordplay— the author's works already contain more than enough of both. But that's the only complaint I have with Horstmann's picture, which should stand as the final word on Bloomsday dorks and other assorted Joyce fans.

I have a troubled relationship with the entire phenomenon of Bloomsday walks, pub crawls, and readings: Few things are more dismaying than actually meeting the people who share your enthusiasms. If we ever see another great emigration from Ireland, I suspect Senator David Norris' relentless Joyce proselytizing will be partly responsible.

But I think fans in all forms—sports, TV, movies, music—are among the most unfairly maligned members of society. It's heartening to see the "Joyceans," out of the closet of academic drudgery and into the streets broad and narrow they share with Trekkies and Tolkienoids, marching with pride under their multicolored banners, singing out loud and strong for their passion, and being celebrated for it with a nicely made film.

Joyce to the World succinctly captures Ulysses' general outlines and publishing history, the tangled history of critical reception and popular reaction to the book, the long pedigree of Joyce naysaying, the growth of the Joyce industry, and the wide dispersal of contemporary fans and admirers. Bloomsday news coverage tends to be extremely clueless—driveling on one hand about how complex and difficult the book is and marveling on the other about how widely admired and popular it is. It's good to see a documentary that looks at the connections among these various qualities. If it comes to a TV near you, give it a look.