Floaters
Is there anything less
cinematic than a lengthy swatch of voice-over prose recited straight from the
pages of a 75-year-old novel with the camera yoked to an actress's face? Well,
actually, yes, about a million things (car chases, ocean liners taking on
water) when the words are Virginia Woolf's and the face is Vanessa Redgrave's.
In the last half-hour of Marleen Gorris' film of Mrs. Dalloway , Woolf's
rhapsodic prose and Redgrave's radiant countenance combine for some of the most
transcendentally beautiful cinema I have ever seen.
Before I
go nuts with the superlatives, let me add that the previous hour of Mrs.
Dalloway is pretty spotty. The novel, published in 1925, stands
shoulder-high to Woolf's next book, To the Lighthouse --which is to say,
to one of the dozen greatest novels written after World War I. It's almost
entirely interior, set behind the eyes of a handful of upper-crust Londoners,
with point of view slipped like a baton from one character to the next. How do
you adapt it for a medium as surface-oriented as the movies? The book is so
musical in its ebb and flow that it might lend itself best to a chamber opera,
consisting entirely of interwoven solos--monodramas seen and heard by the
audience, no one else.
Gorris--who is Dutch, and whose previous works include the
rabid A Question of Silence (1983) and the Oscar-winning Antonia's
Line (1995)--doesn't get all the notes right, but at least she gets that
there ought to be notes: that the work is fundamentally musical, and that the
music shivers with nostalgia.
For much
of the first hour, Redgrave's Clarissa Dalloway drifts around a sunny,
post-World War I London, talking excitedly of a party to take place at her home
that evening, exchanging formal pleasantries with various aristocrats, and
moving in and out of her memories. We move with her, back before the war, as
the young Clarissa (Natascha McElhone) lazes elegantly on a vast estate,
romping with her saucy (and politically progressive) friend Sally Seton (Lena
Headey) and putting up with Peter Walsh (Alan Cox), a misanthropic but palpably
smitten suitor. Then she meets the bland, proper Richard Dalloway (Robert
Portal) and, in choosing to marry him, goes where she has been bred to go--and
where she will be safest. The very title of the work is tinged with regret,
since its protagonist is presented to us not as lighthearted Clarissa but as
the older Dalloway's somewhat shrinking, sickly missus. (It's odd that Gorris,
whose other films are so flagrantly--even homicidally--feminist, should put so
much more emphasis on Clarissa's rejection of Peter when Woolf gives equal, if
not stronger, weight to her inchoate romantic feelings for the vivacious
Sally.)
Woolf provides a nightmarish echo to Mrs.
Dalloway in Septimus Warren Smith (Rupert Graves), an ex-soldier who has had
the misfortune of witnessing a buddy being blown to bits in front of his eyes.
He now slips in and out of lucidity before his despairing, Italian-born wife,
Rezia (Amelia Bullmore); like Clarissa, he is haunted by the lack of permanence
in all things. Mrs. Dalloway and Septimus never meet, but Gorris brings them in
sight of each other at the start of the film; and news of Septimus' fate
triggers Mrs. Dalloway's tortured and then euphoric final musings--the epiphany
that brings the movie to its poetic conclusion.
Until
then, the doings have been awfully prosy. Mrs. Dalloway's flashbacks are of the
Masterpiece Theatre variety when they ought to have been less objective,
more impressionistic, even if such doodling had come at the expense of a
full-bore narrative thrust. (Woolf herself is always losing the pulse of the
narrative--which is perhaps the whole point.) Eileen Atkins, the English
actress who adapted Mrs. Dalloway as a labor (or labour) of love, has
done almost too smooth a job of translating its characters'
stream-of-consciousness perceptions into speakable dialogue. Better, I think,
to have left some bleeding fragments. If ever a project called for a
combination writer-director--a writer who would confidently leave things
unwritten, secure in the knowledge that he or she would, as director, fill it
all in--it's Mrs. Dalloway .
As Gorris weaves together past and present, often moving
back and forth several times in a single scene, she aims for a melting
fluidity. But her images refuse to melt. Her pass-the-baton shifts in point of
view come off as fancy but not especially resonant. When the camera lingers on
Mrs. Dalloway's daughter, Elizabeth (Katie Carr), as she sits on the top of a
double-decker bus, the girl's face is blank and the moment empty of meaning.
Why have we followed Elizabeth onto this bus? (I half expected it to flatten
some poor Tolstoyesque peasant.) It turns out that we stay with her so she can
gaze, in passing, at an apartment house--so that the camera can travel up to
and through a window and come upon Septimus supine on a sofa,
contemplating--what? Read the book to learn what he's thinking and feeling,
because all Gorris gives us is a guy grimacing on a couch and a lot of distant
explosions to signal his flashbacks.
It is
Graves who suffers most from the lack of imagination. The traumatized,
flashback-ridden veteran was a novel figure when Mrs. Dalloway was
written--and something of a mascot for the postwar modernist literature that
followed. Now, after decades of watching sweaty Vietnam vets sitting bolt
upright in bed after acid-soaked nightmares of their buddies getting
disemboweled, moviegoers regard such characters as so much Freudian chin music.
In the book, what goes through Septimus' head retains its power to startle--not
so much for what he remembers as for how his remembrances color the present and
pierce its surface like an X-ray. The movie's Septimus never seems more than a
literary conceit, and only in his fleeting moments of sanity does Graves
acquire a mordant poignancy.
It should be said that Redgrave, in addition to
being too old for Mrs. Dalloway, is too tall (she looms over her husband) and
too forceful. All of which means, of course, diddly squat. It barely matters
that the book's characters have been aged from their 40s to their 60s to
accommodate her, because what else do you do when you have a shot at casting
the greatest actress in the world? Even silent, Redgrave is plangent, a
quivering string. Pity the poor actress who has to embody her earlier self.
McElhone is a handsome young woman with the demeanor of an Irish milkmaid--not
so much unformed as opaque. There's a thin line between period acting and
overacting, and more than once McElhone drifts over it.
With the
exception of Bullmore's ghastly Rezia (her accent is pathetic), the rest of the
actors are treasurable: Michael Kitchen as old Peter Walsh, who melds so
perfectly with Alan Cox, the young Walsh, that I wondered if Gorris had got
hold of a time machine and used the same actor twice; Selina Cadell's
rough-hewed missionary Miss Kilman; Sarah Badel's stout and effulgent Lady
Rosseter (the aged Sally Seton); Oliver Ford Davies' lockjawed twit Hugh
Whitbread; John Standing's anxiously settled older Dalloway; and the lyrically
foolish Lady Bruton of Margaret Tyzack, full of liberal schemes for helping the
unemployed by shipping them off to Canada.
But it is Redgrave to whom we return. In the last
half-hour, at the party, we are finally allowed to hear Mrs. Dalloway's
thoughts. (Why couldn't there have been voice-overs all along?) As Redgrave
moves from person to person--worrying about what each is really thinking, and
about the young man whose tragic fate she heard tell of from one of her
guests--the movie floods with feeling. As potent as one of Beethoven's last
string quartets, Mrs. Dalloway becomes a heartbreaking meditation on the
evanescence of all things. And like Clarissa herself, I didn't want the party
to end. I'll see the film again for the last sequence alone: anything to stare
at Redgrave's face once more, to hear her say, "You want to say to each moment:
'Stay. Stay. Stay.' "
