Two elements make Virginia Woolf's complex novel
difficult to interpret in a screenplay:
(1) The story intertwines two stories which are virtually unrelated. Woolf
created the novel by combining two of her short stories without actually
bringing them together. In one of the stories a 60ish English matron recalls
the decisions of her youth which led her to her current station, and which
might have led to a very different life if reversed. In the other story, a
shell-shocked veteran of WW1 loses his grasp on reality, and he commits
suicide after being provoked by some ignorant
decisions by his doctor. Every Virginia Woolf story seems
to include at least two occasions when people contemplate suicide, often
followed by a successful attempt. Woolf herself committed suicide about twenty
years after this story was published, by filling her pockets with heavy stones
and walking into a river.
Except for common themes (Mrs Dalloway and the soldier both ruminate
interminably about the impermanence of existence), the two stories have only the vaguest connection,
and the two central characters never meet at all. Mrs Dalloway finds out
about the young man's suicide because she has invited the insensitive doctor
to one of her parties. Hearing the story prompts her into a Hamlet-style
monologue (interior monologue in this case) about the nature and frailty of
existence. Of course it's common to treat two such unrelated stories in a
modern novel, which can theoretically be of unlimited length (and Virginia Woolf
admired Proust, so unlimited length could well have been within her
aspirations).
(2) The novel is told with a modernistic narrative style, ala Joyce's
Ulysses. The sentences can drift along in the stream of consciousness (see an
example in the right column), and the actual time frame of the story, like Ulysses, is a single day in Mrs Dalloway's
life as she prepares to host a lavish soiree for the creme de la British creme.
Within that time frame are her recollections of the summer thirty years
earlier when she was being romanced by three people - two male and one female
- and her musings about how her life might have been if she had made one of
the other choices. In addition to her thoughts, the narrative slips into the
minds of others, including the disturbed former warrior.
The film version of Mrs Dalloway is a sporadically effective attempt to
bring a this unfilmable novel to the screen. The film's creators had some success in meeting the second challenge
outlined above. The
narrative problems seem to have been handled quite smoothly through a
combination of flashbacks and present day drama, with the occasional use
of voice-over narrative to represent Mrs. Dalloway's thoughts.
Unfortunately,
the other problem remained intransigent, to the point where the
audience is left entirely baffled by all the scenes with the deranged soldier,
and viewers feel stranded in episodes which seem at the time to have
absolutely no bearing on the main plot. The complex and mostly implicit connection
between Dalloway and the soldier, which fits comfortably within a modern novel, does not slip so easily into a screenplay for a 97 minute movie. If it is truly the story
of Mrs Dalloway, and if we really care about that story, then all the screen time
devoted to the troubled veteran seems like an interruption of the film's
momentum, and a deliberate effort to give short shrift to the story of
Dalloway and her youth. And there's just no need for it. The mortality themes
can be developed within Mrs. Dalloway's story and do not require any
reinforcement from the other character. Given that fact, the soldier's story
is really on screen to portray the uninformed treatment of mental patients in
the early 20th century. While that is certainly a worthwhile topic, and one
that Virginia Woolf knew intimately and well from
the emotional distress she suffered throughout her own life, it was a theme that
seemed too ambitious to add to the to-do list of this short film.
Although the soldier's final day of
life does later generate an important reaction from Mrs Dalloway, her reaction
to his suicide is no more dramatic than it would have been if she had merely
heard about it and imagined some details. In fact it would probably be better
that way, because the audience would then be experiencing the news in
Dalloway's own point of view, which would make it consistent with the rest of
the film. The script came up with no good
reason to portray the soldier in flesh and blood, and if he had been kept as an off-camera anecdote
it would have allowed more time to
develop Clarissa Dalloway's romantic rectangle from the past. When the great party finally
begins in the film's present time, it just so happens that the two jilted lovers both choose that very
day to reappear in Mrs. Dalloway's life, even though she has seen neither for
many years prior to the day of the party. The viewer is left wondering what
their lives have been like in the interim, and more of that exposition would
have been more interesting than the lunatic babbling of the soldier turned
mental patient.
In my opinion, the film had another problem greater than the sticky narrative
structure. As portrayed on screen, Mrs Dalloway and her male lovers
are not very
interesting. Mrs. Dalloway seems to be a sweet person, but before she turns
into Hamlet she seems like a
superficial twit who spends far too much time thinking about parties, both in
the past and the present. Her husband is
a boring aristocratic bureaucrat of limited intellect and no imagination. The
jilted male suitor is supposed to be brainy and adventurous, but we know that
only because people say it. What we actually see is
that he's a whiny bitch who spends three quarters of his screen time pouting.
While Mrs. Dalloway wonders whether she should have chosen the passionate
intellectual over the staid aristocrat, it is apparent to us that the
alternate relationship with the moody intellectual really had no
promise at all. The future Mrs. Dalloway was too superficial to fit into his expatriate world, and he was just
too immature and idealistic to handle marriage. He thought he was in love with her only
because he was young and impressionable and she was a beautiful woman with a generous, pleasant
nature. She demonstrated no sense of adventure or intellectual curiosity, and
in his youthful infatuation he failed to realize that hers were not the ideal
qualifications for a woman who would have to endure significant hardships in
sweaty foreign assignments. The film's version of Mrs Dalloway never shows any depth at all until
she enters her "to be or not to be" monologue, but by then the credits are
about to roll, and it is too late to show us what the jilted suitor ever saw
in her in the first place, other than a beautiful smile. And I have no idea
what she saw in him. The basis for their attraction could have been
demonstrated by giving those characters some of the screen time currently dedicated to the
incoherent mumbling of the soldier.
But that's only the half of it. The other intrinsic problem is that Mrs Dalloway is not shown to have any real
attraction for either man, so we wonder why the choice between them
weighs so heavily on her. In fact, the only time when she truly seems in love
is when her idealistic girlfriend kisses her passionately, whereupon she seems to be
transfixed under a spell of delight and satisfaction. She has no similar
response to either man! When the script is mulling over her regrets about
choosing the wrong man, it should have shown her questioning whether she
should have chosen a man at all! The body language of the actors showed that the female suitor was actually her
true love, and the female suitor also seemed to me like the liveliest, most
imaginative, best read, and most interesting of the four characters in their
youth, so I was left wondering why Mrs. Dalloway spent so much time mulling
over her rejection of the wimpy guy, which seems to the audience like a pretty
shrewd and obvious move, while she never really considered what her life
might have been like with the daring woman she truly loved! There is a warrant
for that interpretation on the pages of the novel ("Her relation in the old
days with Sally Seton. Had not that, after all, been love?"), and an even stronger justification in Virginia Woolf's own existence. After all, Woolf wrote
this book about the subjects she knew. She was not only suicidal and a frequent mental patient,
but was also a bisexual who preferred women. Vita Sackville-West, not
Leonard Woolf, was the true love of Virginia's own life! Given the novel's
focus, Virginia Woolf's own inclinations, and the fact that the film's director is noted for her own
preference for female characters in both her life and her films, this
script could easily and legitimately have promoted the lesbian attraction
from sub-text to text, and it would have been a better film for it.
The one thing I found most impressive about the film was the way Vanessa Redgrave
(old Clarissa Dalloway) and Natascha McElhone (young Clarissa) managed to seem like the same person, even
though they do not look much alike. I don't know how the two actresses
worked it out, but they did a marvelous job of creating a mutual set of
mannerisms which were identical down to the tiniest visible nuances: the same
way of holding their hands, the identical accent and phrasing, the same
spontaneous nervous smile, and so forth. The film featured good performances
from both women, as well as from Lena Headey as the female suitor (playing a
very young woman, although she was 31 at the time!) I might have been drawn into the
story if only there had been some worthy males for them to play against!
