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
"Listlessly, yet confidently, poor people all of them, they waited;
looked at the Palace itself with the flag flying; at Victoria,
billowing on her mound, admired her shelves of running water, her
geraniums; singled out from the motor cars in the Mall first this one,
then that; bestowed emotion, vainly, upon commoners out for a drive;
recalled their tribute to keep it unspent while this car passed and
that; and all the time let rumour accumulate in their veins and thrill
the nerves in their thighs at the thought of Royalty looking at them;
the Queen bowing; the Prince saluting; at the thought of the heavenly
life divinely bestowed upon Kings; of the equerries and deep curtsies;
of the Queen’s old doll’s house; of Princess Mary married to an
Englishman, and the Prince—ah! the Prince! who took wonderfully, they
said, after old King Edward, but was ever so much slimmer."
Adding to the anti-cinematic nature of the novel is the fact that the
actual time frame of the story, like that of 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 turned out 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!