Look at road not taken entertains in `Dalloway’

“Mrs. Dalloway”

Directed by Marleen Gorris. Written by Eileen Atkins, based on the novel by Virginia Woolf. Running time: 97 minutes. Rated PG-13 (for mild adult content and brief nudity). May 11-22, Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville.

“Mrs. Dalloway,” the solid adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s great novel, is about the person forever poised on the road not taken while remaining tenuously rooted in a present filled with misgivings, uncertainties and what ifs.

As Clarissa Dalloway, a woman of certain means whose internal voices are far more rebellious than her polished exterior suggests, Vanessa Redgrave is terrific; listening to her exhale Woolf’s dialogue is reason enough to see the film. Though tall and broad-shouldered, her Dalloway is nevertheless a regal swan — albeit one who has clipped her own wings.

Focusing on a single June day in 1923 London, the film — as does the book — follows Clarissa as she prepares for a party that will bring with it a whirlwind of conflicting emotions as she looks back on her life, and sees with anguished clarity precisely how she has blown it.

In her youth, this once-gorgeous, playful woman had two suitors — the adventurous Peter Walsh and the rather benign, yet more stable and successful Richard Dalloway. Choosing safety over uncertainty, Clarissa took Richard for her husband, but was he the right man? Would her life have been more fulfilling, more exciting, more romantic had she run off with the more daring Peter? That question forever lingers within Clarissa, coloring her days every bit as much as her decision to marry Richard has diminished the bright dreams of her youth.

Throughout the day, Clarissa wrestles with her choices, her fears and her disappointments, while at the same time a young man she never meets, the deeply disturbed war veteran Septimus Warren Smith (Rupert Graves), mirrors her own concerns about what makes us go on.

Septimus leaps from a window, impaling himself on an iron railing just hours before Clarissa’s party, shaking her so deeply that she is sent into herself, where she sees clearly for the first time the life of “corruption, lies and chatter” she chose mainly out of cowardice.

“Mrs. Dalloway” is an excellent film that moves seamlessly between past and present, mediocrity and success, death and life, hope and despair. It is at its best during Clarissa’s supremely bitchy party, where her interior monologue comes alive as she greets her guests with warm smiles, pleasant hellos, and a barbed tongue that skewers them all straight to their British bones.

Director Gorris — whose “Antonia’s Line” won an Academy Award for best foreign film in 1995 — had the difficult job of capturing the essence of a novel that occurs mostly in the mind of its protagonist, melding memory, allusion and observation into an electrically charged stream of consciousness; she has succeeded, though in the translation she loses some of the novel’s subtlety.

Lucky for Gorris (and for us) that she had Redgrave, whose expressive eyes and haunting voice allow us into an interior in great turmoil, giving the film a depth it otherwise may not have had.

As for Woolf, in the end she was more Septimus than Clarissa: In March of 1941, the author threw herself into the Ouse River, ending her life and with it her remarkable talent.

Grade: A-

Video of the Week

“The House of Yes”

Directed and adapted for the screen by Mark Waters. Based on a play by Wendy MacLeod. Running time: 86 minutes. Rated R (for language, bizarre sexual situations, violence).

Well, actually, no — “The House of Yes” will not do for a title to this unfortunate, charmless film. This film, this movie, this peep show would be better suited if called “The House of Bad Taste,” “The House of Sibling Incest,” “The House of Raised Eyebrows,” but certainly not “The House of Yes.”

Calling this “The House of Yes” implies that it is an agreeable film, which it isn’t. What it is is a film that shocks with a sense of humor that is too dark — even for this critic — to be anything more than disturbing.

The premise is simple, and twisted: On a stormy Thanksgiving night in 1983, Marty Pascal (Josh Hamilton) introduces his fiancee, Lesly (Tori Spelling, of all people), to his family, which includes his kid brother Anthony (Freddie Prinze Jr.), his disillusioned mother (Genevieve Bujold), and his twin sister (Parker Posey), who calls herself Jackie-O.

That’s right — Jackie-O, as in Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, depicted here by Posey as a jealous, certifiable nut case determined to put a stop to her brother’s marriage. Dressed in a knockoff of the pink suit and pillbox hat Onassis wore on the day of her husband’s death, Posey’s Jackie-O is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown who can’t seem to have sex with her twin without first re-enacting JFK’s assassination. It’s all a bit too much — too ridiculous, too stupid, too offensive for words.

Grade: D

Christopher Smith, a writer and critic who lives in Brewer, reviews films each Monday in the NEWS.