Thank you for all your reads and rates... bear with me if I don't respond, I'm trying to catch up on...
Thank you for all your reads and rates... bear with me if I don't respond, I'm trying to catch up on my own alerts. But I do appreciate every single comment. Lx
Member since:28.03.2003
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If you avoided this one at the cinema either because you know nothing about the person or the work of Virginia Woolf, or because you found the much-hyped ‘suicide’ theme off-putting…forget all that. Go buy or rent this film. Send the men off to the pub or their reading group or whatever, and sit back and enjoy.
It is an unashamedly feminine film. The focus is three completely differently lives of three unrelated women, decades apart. Three stories told alongside each other. This is a device which does take a little while to settle in, but bear with it. It works very well.
By now you will have heard more than enough about Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of Woolf. It may be hype, but it doesn’t lie. She is brilliant. Floaty and surreal in true 20s/30s style for most of the time, but very strong in the subdued anger moments, and touching in her interactions with the children, especially her young niece. All this rounded off with a wonderful outburst of uncontrolled passion, somehow almost-but-not-quite-subdued by love for the unfortunate helpmeet (whose response is just too adorably English for words!) Was Woolf mad, or ‘just’ depressed? I don’t know. If this portrayal is accurate, she wasn’t either. She was struggling creatively, she was misunderstood and she was angry, and, sometimes, unable to cope.
The second strand is fifties America. Laura Brown (Juliane Moore) is the imperfect wife of a war hero. (“They deserve it, don’t they?…..oh, I don’t know….Us, I suppose….”) Beautiful…but somehow hapless…but truly loved, in many ways lucky, in others still ‘trapped’ …. another woman, somehow, failing to cope. (“It’s a cake, for goodness sake, anyone can bake a cake”!…. hard enough hearing from the neighbour…. “mom, it ain’t that difficult….” from a pre-school male must really undermine your confidence.) The truly sad character in the entire film is that pre-schooler. Laura Brown’s son. The intense performance of Jack Ronello clearly seeing beyond his years, is perfection. The screaming routine of the ‘separation’ scene doesn’t quite work, because his percipience elsewhere suggests that he wouldn’t have screamed. That few seconds is the one point of the film that really should have been left on the cutting room floor.
Then there is Clarissa (Meryl Streep). Successful literary editor sharing her life with her partner of ten years and, intermittently, with her daughter, whilst supporting an ailing friend. Archetypal busy-busy 90s lifestyle. Gaining and losing by it. Acutely aware that she is “holding herself together”.
Three women, with near-perfect-surface-lives. Three stories that merely scratch those surfaces and yet reveal so much. In the similarities and the differences. Mostly in the similarities I found. Those who told you this was a film about madness and depression and suicide were so wrong. It is a film about everyday difficulties and the choices we make… sometimes those choices do involve death, at least equally often though not necessarily any less painfully they involve life. & There is no way to predict whether one or the other.
I’ll own up to a tear or two, but I was surprisingly heart-warmed by it.
For those wondering why I haven’t mentioned Mrs Dalloway, it’s because I haven’t read the book & don’t fully understand the significance. I found that didn’t matter at all.
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Production Year: 1989 - Drama - Director: Ken Cameron - Original Language: English - Classification: 18 years and over - Starring: Nicole Kidman, Denholm Elliott, Hugo Weaving, Joy Smithers, Norman Kaye, Jerome Ehlers, Judy Morris
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