Mrs. Dalloway (Vanessa Redgrave) is hosting a party; as she prepares for it, she flashes back to her youth, when she choose Mr. Dalloway -- a safe, steady man -- over Peter Walsh, who loved her almost too much. Not much actually goes on in the movie, and that's kind of a problem, since, as our speaker put it, "Redgrave's face can't say what Woolf wrote." Although there's some voiceover, there are also an awful lot of interminable close-ups of people's faces where we have no idea what they're thinking -- I guess those who had read the novel had some inkling, but I didn't. So it tends to bog down quite often.
But there are some very witty lines, and Natascha McElhone as the young Mrs. Dalloway (Clarissa) is lively and beautiful. Alan Cox and Michael Kitchen are both splendid as, respectively, the young and old Peter, who comes across as one of those wonderfully gothic tragic-romantic heroes (but then I'm a sucker for that unrequited love crap). Almost from the beginning, though, it depressed me horribly to see the vibrant young Clarissa turn into the vacant and quite dull Mrs. Dalloway who can only natter on and on about her party. I realize that it's set in the early part of the century and that women's options were different then, but it was just unbelievably sad to see that she has nothing better to do with her life than obsess over whether or not the right people will come to her party.
If you like laughing at stuffy British people, you'll enjoy this. It's definitely for the Merchant-Ivory crowd only, though, and it certainly won't lose anything if you wait for it to come out on video.
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