‘Mrs. Dalloway’: Truths of All Lives, Comfortable or Not

Janet Maslin

Friday, Feb. 20, 1998 | 9:12 a.m.

Moviegoers with a taste for the classics must suppose that Jane Austen, Henry James, E.M. Forster and now Virginia Woolf have much in common: fondness for formal gardens, luxurious vanilla costumes and grand parties that turn life into one long, privileged frolic.

Yet even for viewers who accept this as the visual language of the literary adaptation, Woolf's great "Mrs. Dalloway" represents a formidable challenge.

Within the graceful whirl of this hauntingly beautiful book, the layers of life on a single June day in 1923 London are explored in ways that simply have no cinematic equivalent. "She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on," Woolf wrote about her aging socialite heroine, arguably the last woman in 20th-century fiction whom we might expect to see captured on screen.

As Maureen Howard describes Woolf's verbal delicacy in a preface to "Mrs. Dalloway," the book exults in "the shimmering flow of language and emotion that strains, in paragraph after paragraph, to contain the intricacies of life."

Yet the film adaptation of "Mrs. Dalloway" is as elegantly wrought and reflective as the material allows (which is to say that in this case, a trip to the library makes for an invaluable part of the experience). As adapted with fidelity by the actress Eileen Atkins and directed by Marleen Gorris (whose Academy Award-winning "Antonia's Line" was much less adroit), the film drifts easily between past and present, romance and pragmatism, hope and despair in its evocation of Woolf's vision.

At the center of all this is the eloquent fragility of Clarissa Dalloway, who finds in the sound of laughter something that "seemed to reassure her on a point which sometimes bothered her if she woke up early in the morning and did not like to call her maid for a cup of tea: how it is certain we must die."

Clarissa Dalloway, whose very name is redolent of her comfortable existence, is rendered larger than life by the very mundanity that consumes her. On the day in question, five years after the end of World War I, Clarissa is happily preoccupied with plans for a party that evening. Yet she is overwhelmed, and heightened, by the book's contrasting strains of deep reverie and reflection.

Ms. Gorris' best means of simulating this bifurcated state is to give the film two Clarissas, both radiant, one in her 50s and the other exuberantly young. While Natascha McElhone brings a beaming nonstop ingenuousness to the younger role, it is Vanessa Redgrave's marvelous performance as the aging, soul-searching Clarissa that gives the film its grandeur.

One glimpse of Ms. Redgrave in the film's opening sequence, a morning walk through London with the errand of buying flowers, is enough to provide assurance that this film was worth the artistic gamble. Neither the actress nor the novelist condescends to a character who can be described as vapid (and indeed often seems that way to her embittered suitor, a man named Peter Walsh) and yet resonates so deeply throughout the story.

As Ms. Redgrave's stately, sad-eyed Clarissa contemplates the florist's sweet peas, she comes face to face with an alter ego, the shell-shocked young veteran Septimus Warren Smith (Rupert Graves) whose pain she finds unexpectedly disturbing. Each of them, like the England of 1923, is somehow grappling with the same question. As Clarissa puts it: "What makes us go on?"

The star's evocation, through carriage and coiffure, of Woolf herself adds extra poignancy to that thought. So do the memories that swirl through Clarissa's daydreams.

There was a time, replete with vanilla clothes and house parties at the country manor, when she and young Peter (Alan Cox) might have shaped their lives differently, the same time when Clarissa found herself in a flirtation with the pretty, headstrong Sally Seton (Lena Headey). This was a time when each of the story's principals, played by two actors apiece, showed a youthful fire that has long since vanished. By 1923 the men have grown pompous and paunchy, while Clarissa herself muses on the idea of being Mrs. Dalloway. She is, she notes, well past the point of being thought of by her first name.

On a day punctuated by sudden death and by Peter's unexpected return from India, the film does its best to capture the book's many minor characters and carefully orchestrated shifts in point of view.

It must be said that some are bound to mystify viewers unfamiliar with the novel's hidden depths. There are gaps here that Ms. Gorris cannot fill and connections she does not entirely make. Peter's reunion with Clarissa, for instance, seems awkward and blunt, since so much is left unsaid. So does an opening scene that underscores thoughts of war with an actual battle scene.

There are also times when the characters say too much, as when someone exclaims: "Oh, you snob! You represent all that's detestable in British middle-class life!"

Another small stumbling block is the matching of actors, since the film's young male characters don't fully resemble their aging counterparts. Young Clarissa and Sally are more wittily matched with their alter egos.

In any case, there are strong supporting performances from Amelia Bullmore as Septimus' worried wife, from Michael Kitchen as the brooding Peter and from John Standing as Clarissa's courtly husband. Each of them reaches ably for what Woolf called, in a more sexual context, "an inner meaning almost expressed."

Also in the film, quite amusingly, is a big naughty dog. Seen galumphing around the country house of Clarissa's youth, it displays pure obliviousness to directorial instruction. The dog can be seen lying peacefully at Ms. McElhone's feet in posters for "Mrs. Dalloway," but in the film she is seen struggling to hold the animal down with her foot for even a few seconds. Then it bolts off-camera and runs away.

Production notes:

VIRGINIA WOOLF'S MRS. DALLOWAY

Rating: "Mrs. Dalloway" is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It includes brief violence, mild profanity and very brief nudity in one scene.

Directed by Marleen Gorris; written by Eileen Atkins, based on the novel by Virginia Woolf; director of photography, Sue Gibson; edited by Michiel Reichwein; music by Ilona Sekacz; production designer, David Richens; produced by Stephen Bayly and Lisa Katselas Pare; released by First Look Pictures.

Cast: Vanessa Redgrave (Mrs. Dalloway), Natascha McElhone (Clarissa Dalloway), Rupert Graves (Septimus Warren Smith), Michael Kitchen (Peter Walsh), Alan Cox (Young Peter), Lena Headey (Young Sally), John Standing (Richard Dalloway) and Amelia Bullmore (Rezia Warren Smith).

Running time: 97 minutes.