Three women, three single days and one novel running through all of them. Stephen Daldry’s adaptation is handsomely made and acted with real care, Julianne Moore especially, but David Hare’s script keeps saying the point aloud and Philip Glass’s piano never lets it breathe.
Michael Cunningham’s novel gives three women a single day each and lets Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway run through all of them: Woolf writing it in Richmond in 1923, a Los Angeles housewife reading it in 1951, a New York editor in 2001 nicknamed after its heroine. David Hare’s screenplay keeps that shape, and Stephen Daldry cuts between the three days so that the women wake together, wash together and look into mirrors together. It is a serious, well-acted film about depression, and it is worth your evening. It is a film that keeps telling you what it means, and by the end we wanted it to stop.
Seamus McGarvey gives each period its own light. Richmond is brown wood and grey window, Los Angeles is lemon yellow and turquoise, New York is the flat blue of a winter morning. Maria Djurkovic’s three houses tell you what each woman has been allowed: a study with the curtains half drawn, a new kitchen, a flat stacked with books. Ann Roth puts Laura Brown in a housedress she cannot quite breathe in and Clarissa in trousers and a big coat. Peter Boyle cuts on matched actions, three faces turning from a mirror, three vases set down, and the first few times the trick is exciting. By the tenth it is a tic.
Kidman plays Woolf with her face lengthened and her voice dropped low. She barely moves. It is a good, careful piece of work that never lets us forget how careful it is. Streep, as Clarissa, is the opposite, all errands and lists, buying flowers and arranging a party for a man who would rather be left alone; she is best when the busyness runs out and she has to sit down. Ed Harris, as Richard, in a dim flat in a dressing gown, supplies the film’s only real anger. Stephen Dillane’s Leonard Woolf is the quietest good performance in it, a man counting his wife’s meals and pretending not to.
It is Julianne Moore who got at us. Laura Brown has a new house, a kind husband (John C. Reilly), a second child on the way and a cake to bake, and Moore plays her as a woman doing a convincing impression of someone who is fine. The scene in the kitchen with her son Richie (Jack Rovello), in which the cake goes wrong and the boy watches his mother’s face rather than the cake, moved us more than anything else in it. Rovello does almost nothing. He looks, the way small children look at a parent who is somewhere else, and we had not expected to be undone by sponge.
The trouble is Hare. He is a fine dramatist who does not trust the pictures. Every so often a character stops and says what the film means, about facing a life, about choosing, and the lines sound like a summary of the novel read aloud. Philip Glass’s score does the same job in music: one rolling piano figure over and over, rising whenever anyone looks out of a window, flattening three quite different women into a single mood. Richard Strauss is also credited, for a song on a record in Richard’s flat, and those seconds are more affecting than the whole of Glass.
The New York strand is the weakest. Woolf’s day and Laura’s day are held in check; Clarissa’s tips into speeches and slammed doors, and a late scene in Richard’s flat is staged for effect in a way the rest of the film would not allow. There is a late flourish that we will not describe, except to say it ties a bow on a story that did not need one.
It is braver than most literary adaptations: it is about three women who are not sure they want to go on living, and it says so plainly within a 12A. Watch it at home and turn the volume down when the piano starts; the faces carry it, and at 114 minutes it does not overstay. The reviews were warmer than we are; the difference is the score and the script. The women are as good as anyone said.
