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| Mrs. Dalloway | The
Hours | The French Lieutenant's Woman |
Possession | Wide Sargasso
Sea |
Michael Cunningham
 Audio
Interview
John Fowles
Audio Interview
Mrs.
Dalloway
1998/Color/97 Mins
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Vanessa Redgrave glows from within as the heroine of this superb
adaptation of Virginia Woolf's novel. As Clarissa Dalloway prepares
to host a sumptuous party, her mind wanders back to a summer in her
youth, when she was courted by an eager young man--a young man whose
much older self will come to the very party she's preparing. Mrs. Dalloway
moves fluidly between the past and the present, exploring the shifts
in perspective and understanding with an unsentimental but graceful
eye. What's most stunning is the remarkable interplay between the younger
and older actors, who truly seem to be different versions of the same
character (the young Clarissa is played by Natascha McElhone). Beautifully
directed by Marleen Gorris (Antonia's Line), the movie also features
Rupert Graves as a shell-shocked soldier who crosses Clarissa's path.
The Hours
2003/Color
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Delicate and hypnotic, The Hours interweaves three
stories with remarkable skill: in the 1920s Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman)
grapples with her inner demons and slowly works on her novel Mrs. Dalloway;
in 1949 housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) feels her own destructive
impulses; and in 1999 book editor Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep)--much
like the title character of Woolf's novel--prepares to throw a party,
in honor of her dearest friend, a seriously ill poet (Ed Harris). Small
details reverberate from story to story as a powerhouse cast (including
Allison Janney, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, John C. Reilly,
Stephen Dillane, and Miranda Richardson) gives subtle and beautifully
modulated performances. In the hands of director Stephen Daldry (Billy
Elliot), The Hours is almost more a piece of music than a story, and
like music, it may move you in unexpected ways.
The
French Lieutenant's Woman
1981/Color
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Writer Harold Pinter (Betrayal) and director Karel
Reisz (Isadora) take an experimental spin with John Fowles's magnificent
novel set in Victorian England, and come up with something puzzling.
Jeremy Irons and Meryl Streep play the forbidden lovers in Fowles's
story, but in a parallel story line they also play contemporary actors
performing those characters in a movie production and having an affair
of their own during off-hours.
Considering that Fowles himself presents alternative
endings in his novel, something equally eccentric is called for here.
But little is accomplished by this intertwining of a fictional past
and present, and the opportunity to do justice to a great story is lost.
On the plus side, Irons and Streep are instantly striking as a natural
couple on screen, and their presence makes watching this film easy enough
despite the larger problems.
Possession
2002/Color
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Modern love and classic romantic passion meet in this
lush adaptation of A.S. Byatt's brilliant novel. Academics Roland Michell
(Aaron Eckhart) and Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow) are experts on the
work of two different Victorian poets. As they pursue a possible connection
between their subjects, the two sleuths begin to stumble toward a romance
of their own. Though it necessarily loses some of the depth of Byatt's
original, Possession is a worthy adaptation, faithful to the book in
both story and spirit. Director Neil LaBute uses clever and visually
elegant methods of switching back and forth between time periods, subtly
contrasting the prickly moderns and the swoony Victorians without making
either pair seem unappealing. The movie also does an excellent job of
capturing the exhilaration (and the politics) of intellectual discovery,
and feels truly romantic without ever getting icky. Though Paltrow and
Eckhart both succeed as the modern leads, the real standouts are Jeremy
Northam as Randolph Henry Ash and Jennifer Ehle as Christabel LaMotte.
Their passion gives the movie its romantic core and makes the whole
search worthwhile.
Wide
Sargasso Sea
1993/Color
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A prequel to "Jane Eyre." Set in 19th century Jamaica, "Wide
Sargasso Sea" transforms a fairly literal story by Jean Rhys into
a rich and thrilling drama, which is driven as much by the individual
conflicts and misunderstandings as it is by the cultural. "Wide
Sargasso Sea" is one of the few films that successfully combines
the erotic with the lyrical; that depicts the complexity of human passion
without becoming either literal or pedestrian.
With its lush, exotic setting, it is easy to become enmeshed in the
endlessly subtle and colorful aspects of this film from the psychological
to the sociological, individual difference to social conventions. But
the story of Antoinette and Edward is the story of the delicate and
precarious balance between love and knowledge, intimacy and trust, choice
and destiny.
English
Department | IACD
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