MRS. DALLOWAY
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: The title character has spent a
lifetime of taking the easy route, choosing comfort
over making her life meaningful. Now her big
concern is that her party is a success.
Contrasting, we see the story of a shell-shocked
WWI veteran haunted by memories and self-
accusation. Virginia Woolf's cat-like claw takes a
swipe at the British upper-class. Rating: 6 (0 to
10), high +1 (-4 to +4)
Virginia Woolf wrote MRS. DALLOWAY as a stream-of-consciousness novel taking place in the title character's mind. Now Eileen Atkins has adapted the story as a somewhat non-linear narrative jumping forward and backward in time. There are two story lines, tangent at many points but never really converging into a single story. We have a view of Clarissa Dalloway as a young woman (played by Natascha McElhone) and as an older woman (Vanessa Redgrave), and we have the story of Septimus Warren Smith (Rupert Graves). More on his story later. Even as a young woman Clarissa could not commit to anything but comfort and ease. Now as an older woman she has attained comfort and ease and her big concerns at the moment we see her all over the success of one of her own parties. She is an empty shell woman inside whom thoughts bounce around un-weighted by any real profundity. She is nostalgic for a past in which she consistently chose the path of least resistance in spite of frequent temptations to show a little character. As an adult she is an antique and a relic of a dying way of life with little inkling how irrelevant she is outside of a small circle of friends. She has little understanding of the hard world outside that circle.
Nearby and yet so far away is Septimus Smith who fought in the Great War and saw a close friend blown to pieces by a land mine. Already in shock from the war, he felt nothing at seeing his friend die so horribly. Now he is coming out of the initial shock and the meaning of what he has seen is haunting him. He blames himself for feeling nothing at the death of a friend. And he hates his doctors who seem as out of touch with the harsh realities of life as Mrs. Dalloway. They cannot even understand Smith's painful howl and instead pallidly prescribe a rest cure at an asylum. They see Smith as insane when the pain he feels is more real than anything in Mrs. Dalloway's entire useless life.
The theme of the two worlds is curiously reminiscent of Sidney Lumet's THE PAWNBROKER with Holocaust survivor Rod Steiger telling well-meaning do-gooder Geraldine Fitzgerald that he comes from a whole world that she knows nothing about and whose people are of an entirely different species. MRS. DALLOWAY is in some ways very much like THE PAWNBROKER told from the viewpoint of the genteel Fitzgerald character.
Mrs. Dalloway's friends and, in fact, her whole class seem to be out of touch with harsh reality. In a particularly telling sequence, a friend of Dalloway's decides that the best thing for England would be to take all the returning WWI veterans who have been unable to find work on their own and effectively exile them to Canada. Her friends who know a little more decide to humor her in spite of the foolishness and probable illegality of the plan.
Virginia Woolf's MRS. DALLOWAY must have been a difficult novel to adapt (by all accounts, I have not read it) and the script has some technical problems made worst by some casting problems. The telling drifts from present into the past with little signal and it is not always obvious that it has happened. It is very difficult in the flashback sequences to match the younger versions of characters to the older ones since the characters are played by different actors who often are physically quite different. The young Clarissa and her friend Sally are nearly the same height in their 20s and considerably different in height what is probably their 50s. We are led to assume that having children has shortened Sally by what must be six inches. It might well have been better to use only young actors and age them much as Orson Welles aged himself in CITIZEN KANE. But for these problems in the casting, most of the roles seem well-played with veteran British actors in several of the roles.
This film is for the most part gentle, but deep-down there seems to be a lot of anger in the telling, perhaps more than one would find in even an E. M. Forster or John Galsworthy story. It would be interesting to read the novel to see if Woolf has the same disdain for the characters that the film seems to have. I rate MRS. DALLOWAY a 6 on the 0 to 10 scale and a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1998 Mark R. Leeper
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