How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  By a bizarre coincidence that the author of The Hours cannot have foreseen, the invocation of Streep’s and Redgrave’s names invites us to consider another kind of adaptation altogether. As it happens, Vanessa Redgrave was the star of the film adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway, which appeared in 1998, the same year that Cunningham’s novel was published; while Meryl Streep is the star of the film that seems poised to win this year’s Best Picture Oscar, Stephen Daldry’s recent adaptation of The Hours. Daldry’s film is, like its model, a grave and beautiful work, and an affecting one, too; like its model, it goes to great lengths to suggest how literature can change the way we lead our lives. For those reasons, it deserves the acclaim it has gotten. And yet elements of the adaptation suggest that it has done to The Hours what The Hours would not do to Mrs. Dalloway.

  Stephen Daldry’s film adaptation of Cunningham’s book shows a good deal more visual imagination than did—which is to say, is a good deal more cinematic than was—his 2000 film Billy Elliot, a sentimental Cinderella fable about a working-class boy who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer. The new film is still, essentially, mainstream moviemaking; it saves its energies for communicating, as clearly as possible, the shape of its three narratives, which as in the book are interwoven, episode by episode. (You wouldn’t want Daldry to make a film of Mrs. Dalloway itself, a work that defies cinematic adaptation. Indeed, the adaptation of Woolf’s novel that starred Vanessa Redgrave, from a script by the actress Eileen Atkins, who played Woolf onstage in her Vita and Virginia, failed to convey the fragmented stream of consciousness that was Woolf’s great achievement in the novel—her new way of “bringing to life” the experience of her ostensibly ordinary heroine.) Still, there are many effective, and affecting, visual touches that reproduce, in filmic terms, the tissues in Cunningham’s novel that connect its three female figures. I am not talking here so much of the recurrent images—of eggs being broken, of flowers being placed in pots, of women kissing other women—that appear in each of the three narratives in the film, as I am of smaller but very telling touches, such as the ingenious cross-cutting between the Woolf, Vaughan, and Brown narratives. At the beginning of the film, when it is morning in all three worlds, we see Virginia bending down to wash her face; the head that rises up again to examine itself in the mirror is that of Meryl Streep, as Clarissa Vaughan.

  Daldry and his screenwriter, David Hare, have, moreover, clearly thought hard about how to represent elements which, in the book, seem not to be of the highest importance, but which in the film convey the book’s concerns in sometimes ravishing visual language. Early on in the novel’s presentation of Laura Brown, Cunningham describes the young woman’s feelings as she allows herself to be swept away by Woolf’s fiction:

  She is taken by a wave of feeling, a sea-swell, that rises from under her breast and buoys her, floats her gently, as if she were a sea creature thrown back from the sand where it had beached itself.

  Daldry and Hare transpose this minor moment to Laura’s visit to the hotel, where it becomes an image that reminds us, in a complex way, just how “carried away” a woman (indeed anyone) can get by literature: in one of the film’s most original moments (one spoiled, for the audience, by its inclusion in the theater trailers and television ads, which has resulted in a deadening of its impact in the theater), we see the pale, beautiful Julianne Moore, who plays Laura, lying on her hotel bed when suddenly the rushing waters of a river—the Ouse, surely—flood the room, buoying and then submerging her and the bed. It’s just after the striking fantasy sequence involving the river waters that Laura realizes she can’t kill herself. (In Daldry’s film—but not in the book—the young mother has brought a number of bottles of prescription pills with her to the hotel, and we’re meant to understand that she intends to take her life there.)

  More of a problem, inevitably, was the film’s representation of Woolf herself. Much has been made of the prosthetic nose used to transform Nicole Kidman into Woolf for the purposes of the film, but while the fake nose has the virtue of making Kidman look less distractingly like an early-twenty-first-century movie star, it also coarsens the Woolf that we do see; the frumpy creature who appears on screen, clumping around in a housedress, breathing heavily through a broad, flat, putty-colored nose, bears little resemblance to the fine-boned, strikingly delicate woman that you see in almost any photograph of Woolf, whose mother was a famous beauty, and who herself was memorably described by Nigel Nicolson, who knew her, as “always beautiful but never pretty.” Without the prosthesis, Kidman is pretty without being beautiful; with it, she is neither.

  The physical appearance of the film’s Woolf is only worth mentioning because it may be taken as a symbol of the ways in which the film’s attempts to invoke Woolf herself, or her work, have the effect of flattening or misrepresenting her—not only Cunningham’s carefully researched, if idiosyncratically reimagined, character, but also the real person. In Hare’s script, for instance, Virginia announces that she’s not going to kill off Mrs. Dalloway, as she’d originally intended; instead, she says, she’s going to kill off the mad poet. (This is the bit that corresponds to Woolf’s insight about the “bride of death” in the novel.) After Vanessa and the children have left, we see Leonard asking Virginia why she has to kill the poet. Because, Virginia announces, “someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more. The poet will die. The visionary.” It is true that you can go back to Mrs. Dalloway and find there a climactic passage in which Clarissa Dalloway muses, on hearing of Septimus’s suicide (it turns out that the young man’s doctor is a guest at her party, and so she hears, as a piece of idle gossip, what has happened to him), that “she felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away…. He made her feel the beauty; made her feel the fun.” But this is an implied comment by the author on her character, Clarissa Dalloway, and how she thinks about things; the scene in the film, by contrast, suggests that it’s a philosophical statement by Virginia Woolf herself: that poets must die so that the rest of us will appreciate the beauty of life, and so forth.

  It is true that the film, like Cunningham’s book, focuses on a small sliver of Woolf’s life: the moment in Richmond immediately prior to her return to London. But it’s still a serious problem that little about this frumpy cinematic Woolf suggests just why she loves London so much; you get no sense of Woolf as the confident, gossip-loving queen of Bloomsbury, the vivid social figure, the amusing diarist, the impressively productive journalist expertly maneuvering her professional obligations—and relationships. (There’s a lot more of the real Virginia Woolf in her Clarissa Dalloway than this film would ever lead you to believe.) If anything, the film’s Woolf is just one half (if that much) of the real Woolf, and it’s no coincidence that it’s the half that satisfies a certain cultural fantasy, going back to early biographies of Sappho, about what creative women are like: distracted, isolated, doomed.

  There are other transpositions in the new film that distort the female characters of Cunningham’s novel just as drastically, and to similar ends. It is strange, coming directly from the novel to Daldry’s movie, to see the central element of Clarissa Vaughan’s story—the unexpected visit from Richard’s old lover Louis, who bursts into tears; a canny reincarnation, as we’ve seen, of the scene in Mrs. Dalloway in which Clarissa’s old flame Peter Walsh comes to see her and weeps uncontrollably—turned inside out. For in the film, it’s Clarissa who goes to pieces in front of Louis. “I don’t know what’s happening,” Meryl Streep says as she stands in her kitchen, cooking for her party. “I seem to be unraveling…. Explain to me why this is happening…. It’s just too much.” Her voice, as she says these lines, cracks on the verge of hysteria. Cunningham’s (and Woolf’s) book places Clarissa at the center of her story: she is the subject of ruminations about objects that are male—surprisingly weak or emotionally fractured males. Daldry and Hare’s film may look as if it’s putting Clarissa at the center of her story—Streep’s the star, after all, or one of the three gifted stars—b
ut what the makers of the film are doing, it occurs to you, is exactly what Woolf worried that men did in their fictional representations of women: seeing women from the perspective of men.

  In the film these men include, indeed, not only Louis, who in the scene I’ve just described sympathetically comforts the helpless Clarissa, but Richard too. In Cunningham’s novel, there’s a passing moment in which Clarissa Vaughan ruefully thinks to herself that she is “trivial, endlessly trivial” (she’s fretting because Sally, a producer of documentaries, hasn’t invited her along to lunch with a gay movie star); but in the film, she’s worried that Richard thinks she’s trivial. “He gives me that look to say ‘your life is trivial, you are trivial,’” Streep says, her voice quavering. For Hare and Daldry, a “woman’s story” must, it seems, involve the spectacle of women losing their self-possession in front of their men—men within the drama, and outside of it, too. Their subtle recasting of Cunningham’s words makes the character into an object (of Richard’s derision, of the audience’s pity) when she had, in the original, been a subject.

  This shift in emphases is even clearer in the Laura Brown portions of the film. Gone are Laura’s darkness, her hidden “brilliance,” her foreign looks and last name: here, she is transformed into the exceedingly fair Julianne Moore, who has made a name for herself in a number of films about outwardly perfect young women who are losing their inner balance (as in this year’s Far from Heaven, and the 1995 film Safe). But to make Laura into a prom queen inverts the delicate dynamic of the novel—the structure that makes you aware of Laura’s latent poetic qualities, her latent similarities to Woolf. In the book, her madness is that of a poet who has not found a voice; in the film, she’s yet another Fifties housewife whose immaculate exterior conceals deep, inchoate dissatisfactions. I found it interesting that in the film, the date for the Mrs. Brown sections has been moved from 1949, as in Cunningham’s novel, to 1951; I suspect it’s because the latter dovetails better with our own cultural clichés about the “repressed Fifties.” Laura’s maiden name has been changed, too, from the distinctly foreign-sounding “Zielski,” which it is in the book, to the distinctly Anglo “McGrath.”

  And in the film, we should remember, Laura goes to the hotel for the day not to read, but to commit suicide, whereas in the novel the idea of self-annihilation occurs to her only once she’s in the hotel, and then only fleetingly. (That Laura may have more dire intentions is suggested by an abstruse literary allusion on Cunningham’s part that has nothing to do with Woolf. Laura checks in to Room 19 at the Normandy Hotel—the same room and hotel where the heroine of Doris Lessing’s story “To Room Nineteen” commits suicide.)

  And so this Laura, rather than being unusual and complex, is closer to a cliché of domestic repression than she is to Cunningham’s character. No wonder that, in a key scene in the film—one that gives away its creators’ prejudices, you suspect—this Laura gets Mrs. Dalloway so wrong. When she has a visit from her neighbor Kitty (whose vibrancy and seeming good health are intended by Cunningham to suggest those of Vanessa Bell, whom the real Virginia Woolf thought “the most complete human being of us all”), Kitty—clearly not a great reader—asks about the copy of Mrs. Dalloway she sees lying on the kitchen counter. Laura replies by describing it as a story about a woman who’s giving a party and “maybe because she’s confident everyone thinks she’s fine, but she isn’t.”

  The problem with this sound bite about Mrs. Dalloway, interpolated by the filmmakers, you suspect, for the sake of an audience that may not have read that novel, is that Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa is fine; as are Cunningham’s Clarissa and his Virginia Woolf, and even his Laura, three women who understand, in their different ways, that, as Clarissa Vaughan realizes on the last page of the novel, “it is, in fact, great good fortune” to be alive. “Everyone thinks she’s fine, but she isn’t” is, on the other hand, a perfect description of Laura as she appears in this film: flawless, the American dream, on the outside, but unraveling on the inside. Which is to say, a character in a film we’ve seen many times.

  At the conclusion of A Room of One’s Own, Woolf summed up her reasons for thinking that women should have a literature of their own: “The truth is, I often like women,” she wrote. “I like their unconventionality. I like their subtlety. I like their anonymity. I like—but I must not run on in this way.” I think Michael Cunningham likes women, too; his book’s female characters are unconventional and subtle—the “anonymous” housewife more so, if anything, than the others. I also think that, at one level, the makers of the new film of Cunningham’s book like women, too. Rarely has a mainstream film offered three more interesting roles for three more accomplished actresses, each of whom makes the most of an admittedly rare opportunity: there are moments—not least, a climactic encounter in Clarissa Vaughan’s apartment between Clarissa’s young daughter, Julia, and the now aged Laura Brown—that will make you cry. (I did.)

  But I think these filmmakers like women in the way Virginia Woolf feared that male writers like, and use, women: these female figures are, in the end, more conventional, less subtle than what either Cunningham or Woolf had in mind. They are, in other words, more like the women we already know from the books and films that men make about women: the self-destructive, glowering, mad poetess; the picture-perfect Fifties housewife slowly cracking up in her flawless midcentury modern décor; the contemporary lesbian frazzled by the effort of caring for her best friend with AIDS, a woman who goes to pieces on her kitchen floor while wearing rubber gloves.

  Still, The Hours is a serious and moving film, one that achieves many of its goals; among other things, it will presumably have many, many more people reading Mrs. Dalloway than Woolf could ever have dreamed of. That is no mean accomplishment. Perhaps it was inevitable that, of all the elements you find in her great novel, the one that the film should have reproduced most successfully is Clarissa Dalloway’s—but not Virginia Woolf’s—conviction that what is truly strange, unconventional, and subtle must be sacrificed so the rest of us might feel the beauty, feel the fun.

  —The New York Review of Books, March 13, 2003

  Victims on Broadway I

  When you look at a piece of delicately spun glass,” Tennessee Williams wrote in the stage directions for The Glass Menagerie, the 1944 play that made his name, “you think of two things: how beautiful it is and how easily it can be broken.” The observation has obvious relevance to that particular drama, which famously features, as one of its symbols, a collection of delicate spun-glass animals owned by one of its soon-to-be emotionally broken characters. (As it happens, the reference to spun glass isn’t a bit of pontificating about the themes of the play: Williams is trying to suggest, with typically ample, even novelistic, descriptiveness, the quality of the musical leitmotif he has in mind for his play.) But it’s hard not to read that stage direction without thinking of Williams’s entire theatrical output: in one way or another, nearly everything he wrote is about beauty and brokenness.

  Or, perhaps, about the beauty of brokenness. For Williams, those “two things”—the beautiful and the broken—were always connected. Even if you discount the by now well-known biographical details that seem to overdetermine this recurring theme—the once-distinguished family fallen into decline; the stunted career of the father; the slightly mad, overbearing mother; the institutionalized and then lobotomized sister—his place, time, and culture seem to have chosen his great theme for him: a recognition that the beautiful (love, romance, “art,” the glories of the past) will always remain out of reach or, if briefly achieved, will always be smashed.

  He was, after all, a product of the Deep South, where many families, like his, struggled to balance memories of a romanticized past with the realities of a less-than-exalted present; and he was, too, a homosexual living at a time when society still insisted on a certain furtiveness—a time when you couldn’t openly acknowledge what it was you found to be beautiful. (Not, as an even cursory perusal of his memoirs suggests, that Wi
lliams bothered about secrecy.) In The Rose Tattoo, there’s a stage direction that calls for two dressmaker’s dummies, “a widow and a bride who face each other in violent attitudes, as though having a shrill argument, in the parlor.” Although the argument persists throughout Williams’s work, you never really doubt that it’s the widow who’s likely to win. Williams was the great dramatist of the beautiful failure, the poet of the noble defeat.

  The sense of inevitability that haunts Williams’s most powerful plays is the reason they are not tragedies in the classical sense but rather dramas of pathos. What makes classical tragedy irresistible is the spectacle of a great figure, powerful and competent, brought unexpectedly low by some flaw in himself, some bad decision rooted in his character that leads, with awful irony, to inexorable destruction. In Williams’s plays, the bad decisions have already been made by the time the curtain rises; the emotional core of his drama lies not in a critical moment of choice but in the spectacle of abjection, of an already doomed, ruined person struggling to hang on to something beautiful. Greek tragedians tend to be interested in character, which is why the suffering comes at the end of their plays (it’s the result of bad choices). Williams is interested in personality, which is why he begins with the suffering, with the poverty or the madness.