Dubliners, drama, documentaries: Joyce the precursor

Two of the later stories in James Joyce's "Dubliners" are two of the more difficult for contemporary readers - used to think it was just me, but no, it's all of us: Ivy Day in the Committee Room and The Mother both have a lot of references to then-contemporary Irish politics and events. Obviously Joyce trying to work new and more expansive themes into his stories at this point, but these two feel a little closed rather than open - but of course they're leading up the grand final story of the collection, The Dead, that so beautifully and seamlessly brings together political, historical, personal, familial, and amatory themes. Ivy Day in particular, though, is perhaps the best early example in Joyce of his "cool" approach to writing fiction: he is simply, or so it seems, capturing an event or a moment in real time, without shaping the story at all in any traditional literary manner. Ivy Day, heavily dependent on dialogue and on the carousel of characters on and off the "stage," seems like a play - and maybe Joyce thought of it that way himself, at least at first? - and seems like a precursor of Mamet. Joyce captures in words the kind of unmediated reality that much after his time documentary filmmakers have been able to capture so effectively: can you picture Ivy Day as a Frederic Wiseman film? In contemporary Boston, or Providence?