Parts of Samuel Beckett's life. On the pile for quite a while due to the poor reviews and expectation that it would be a (possibly rewarding) slog. Directed by James Marsh (Man on Wire (2008), The Night Of (2016)) from an assembly by Neil Forsyth of raw material provided by Beckett (I think).
There are some good bits, and those are probably lifted more-or-less directly from Beckett's work. Things begin somewhat effectively with Joyce (Aidan Gillen) in Paris after a weak, symbolic start with his mother and father in Dublin. He has "less a bonding, more an unhappy welding" with Lucia Joyce (Gráinne Good) who he is charged with taking out dancing. (He doesn't dance, so presumably he's doing the "think later" aspect of the full titular pseudo-quote.) We then meet his Jewish mate Alfy (Robert Aramayo) and long-term partner/wife Suzanne (Léonie Lojkine / Sandrine Bonnaire) and mistress Barbara (Maxine Peake). Nothing suggests he was worthy of the Nobel or why he'd consider it a catastrophe; Suzanne is drawn far more clearly, and even Barbara has more character. Very little of his work is presented or contextualised.
Fionn O'Shea is good as the youthful Beckett; Gabriel Byrne less so as the elder. The rest of the cast does what they are asked to do. The cinematography is unexciting. The soundtrack is loaded up with classical themes that might have been meaningful. I wondered if anyone has drawn the comparisons with George Orwell.
Ben Kenigsberg at the New York Times: an "argu[ment] for printing the legend". Glenn Kenny at Roger Ebert's venue. Reductive, as was Marsh's The Theory of Everything (2014). Peter Bradshaw. Mark O'Connell at the New York Review of Books had so many problems with it that you wonder why he bothered to write a review. Bronagh Gallagher is indeed fine as Nora Barnacle Joyce and is probably why those early dinner scenes work so much better than the rest. It is as if modernism never happened. Is Beckett unsayable? Perhaps this demands a Wittgensteinian analysis.
