Press enter after choosing selection

Screen Scene

Screen Scene image
Parent Issue
Month
May
Year
1998
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
Rights Held By
Agenda Publications
OCR Text

MRS. DALLOWAY [1998. Directed by Marleen Gorris. Cast: Vanessa Redgrave, Natascha McElhone, Rupert Graves. First Look Pictures. 97 mins.] .

Marleen Gorris' Mrs. Dalloway is a strong argument for reading great literature rather than merely seeing it. While Gorris' film is a marvelous motion picture, there's also an elemental psychological dimension to Virginia Woolf's writing that's lacking in the film. And this shortcoming is one that no cinema - at least as we currently understand film aesthetics - could possibly fiII.

Mrs. Dalloway (the film) does manage a creditable job of suggesting its heroine's fleeting state of consciousness. Or, perhaps more accurately, her state of subconsciousness, as she leisurely winds her way through a brightly lit 1923 London summer day. Like shimmering rivulets meandering towards the voluble tributaries of her waking hours, Clarissa Dalloway 's troubling thoughts intrude themselves only suggestively on the eve of one of her cherished social parties.

As the elder Clarissa, Vanessa Redgrave vividly captures this heroine's understated private incertitude as compounded by her all-too accomplished public reticence. With a disciplined Edwardian vanity that's been bred in the bone by upper-class propriety, Redgrave's elder Clarissa is an authentically nuanced tour de force that rightly dominates the film.

By contrast, the younger Clarissa - played with equally vigorous charm by Natascha McElhone in extended flashbacks - is brashly nouveau ... or so she would like to think. For her fin de siècle sophistication subtly masks an insecurity that makes all her decisions of painful import. Each day in Clarissa's youth is a relentless consolidation of one relatively conservative option over competing alternatives. And each decision in turn solidifies Clarissa's future with an all-too-protective veneer whose well coiffured burnish masks a weary matter of fact.

Septimus Warren Smith, a young class World War One veteran, serves as a social and political counterpoint to Clarissa's conventionality. Portrayed by Rupert Graves, Smith represents England's lost generation. Haunted by his improbable survival in battle, Smith searches fitfully for answer to life's meaning. His insecurities reflect the shattered confidence of the British Empire's fortunes following this war to end all wars. What Clarissa feels as an inchoate uneasiness is felt by Smith as a full-blown disintegrative psychosis.

Gorris gracefully weaves these two strands of potentially disjunctive narration together by dipping casually from foreground to background - venturing through past into present and back again - with just enough foreshadowing to give us a sense of these characters probable futures.

Clarissa's sun-drenched afternoons of casually privileged adolescence are contrasted against Smith's obscure understanding that life can turn on the imperceptible flick of a wrist. Among life's walking wounded, his fragile psyche finally cracks like a mirror; while, in contrast, Clarissa Dalloway casts almost no image at all.

Her wistful attempt to remember Smith's face long after they've crossed paths on this sunny June day is one of the most startlingly brilliant climaxes of recent filmmaking. Or, rather more precisely, anticlimax, because as Clarissa pointedly notes, there's a particular place for those whose sense of identity gets utterly lost in their circumstance.

It's in this peculiarly pacific netherland that this vibrant matron has allowed herself to be permanently encased. As she quizzically reflects upon her life, Mrs. Dalloway senses there may be sadder fates, but few quite so soberly placid.

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

 

MRS. BROWN [1996. Directed by John Madden. Cast: Judi Dench, Billy Connnolly, Antony Sher. Miramax FilmsMiramax Home Video. 90 mins.]

The major problem with cynicism is that it demands complicity. And it's this very unfortunate complicity that turns John Madden's Mrs. Brown from a touching historical anecdote into the stuff of mendacity.

John Brown, horseman, and Queen Victoria of England deserve better. For the history is simple enough: After the untimely death of her beloved Prince Albert of Sax-Coburg in 1861 , the Queen's extreme grief led to her closeted seclusion for three years. Those years, largely spent in the Scottish highlands at her estate, Balmoral, saw Victoria eventually attended by Brown back to a semblance of psychological health.

The film, on the other hand, capitalizes on the innuendo that accompanied Brown's attendance to the Queen during this period. Indeed, the film's title makes an assumption - apparently held in Victoria's court and the popular press of the time - that there was a liaison taking place between the sovereign and commoner.

Not only does Mrs. Brown miss a golden opportunity to study an uncommon friendship - forget anything as ambitious as setting the record straight - but it also manages to besmirch the very principle upon which it's ostensibly based. As a result, the film veers unpersuasively from point to point without a firm sensibility and rts emotional core suffers from this lack of focus.

Judi Dench (Queen Victoria), Billy Connolly (John Brown) - and the supporting cast of Antony Sher (Benjamin Disraeli) and David Westhead (Edward, Prince of Wales) - all struggle mightily with their characterizations. Yet by making innuendo the basis of the film's narrative, the impression is made that English political policy during that era was ballast solely for idle gossip and character assassination.

Madden and screenwriter Jeremy Brock are after a touch of regal controversy similar to Nicholas Hytner's film based on the Alan Bennett play, The Madness of King George. But the irony of this 1995 film is lost on Mrs. Brown. For George III's illness from 1788-89 was hereditary while Victoria's grief in 1864 was spiritual. There is a difference.

Confusing friendship with camality, Madden and Brock have muddied both their history and narrative. The film's sequences of the Queen and her horseman interacting together would have a heightened sense of poignancy if this distinction were more forcefully observed. Instead, scenes such as Brown's escorting the Queen and walking her through her grounds take on an unnecessary suggestiveness while the story's meaning is apparent enough.

Through it all, Dench portrays Victoria as a handsomely self-possessed royal power. We're late enough in English constitutional history where the Crown's prerogatives are implied rather than simply enforced through fiat, and Dench's powerful personality makes Victoria's forcefulness an equal match for Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli's manipulative dissimulations.

Likewise, Connolly's Brown is protean in his Scot appearance and manner. Fiercely devoted to his Queen, he absortos unofficial status and de facto power behind the throne effortlessly in his single-minded regard for her health. Perhaps a touch too free-spirited for his own good, Brown's fortunes as a naive courtier rise and fall on his buIIheadedness. It's a fate mere mortals should strive to avoid.

Despite its uneven plot and sometimes unfair interpretations of history, Mrs. Brown manages to survive its more unnecessary byzantine elements. The simple story of a bereaved Queen and her loyal horseman would have been less controversial, but their loyalty towards each other is also that much more inspiring.

That Dench and Connolly manage to convey this flinty integrity despite the other troubling elements surrounding the story makes Mrs. Brown a welcome study in friendship almost despite itself. It's only a pity the film's producers didn't have as much integrity as did their protagonists.

Article

Subjects
Old News
Agenda