How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken (4 page)

In Cunningham's novel, Laura Brown is, in fact, just this combination of prose and poetry. Her life is an ostensibly ordinary one—her day consists of sending her husband, Dan, a former war hero, off to work, and then baking a birthday cake for him with her little son, Richie—but she is not, nor has she ever been, the homecoming queen type. Cunningham goes to considerable lengths to make sure we understand how starkly she stands out against her bland background, “the foreign-looking one with the dark, close-set eyes and the Roman nose,” with her
Polish maiden name and her passion for books. Privately Laura thinks she could be “brilliant” herself. Tormented by inner demons, seething with inchoate creativity, striking-looking, she is clearly meant to bring to mind Woolf herself; her tragedy, the author suggests, is that her time, culture, and circumstances provide no outlets for her lurking creativity other than domestic ones. Baking cakes, for instance: as Laura sets about her day's work, “she hopes to be as satisfied and as filled with anticipation as a writer putting down the first sentence.”

It's really Laura who's the fulcrum of the novel, a hybrid of Clarissa, with her everyday bourgeois preoccupations, and Virginia, the dark, half-mad high priestess of art. And indeed, in the novel's deeply moving conclusion, we get to see how Laura is the bridge that connects Woolf, in 1923, to Clarissa Vaughan, in the 1990s: little Richie, it turns out, grows up to be Clarissa's friend Richard, the poet. It is Laura who, through her reading of Woolf (she flees to a hotel in order to finish the book in peace and quiet), understands that the life she's living is somehow terribly wrong for her: she feels she's going mad. And it is Laura who finds reserves of terrible strength to preserve her own sanity, her authentic self. By the end of
The Hours
she's decided to abandon her family after the birth of her second child; we learn later that she moves to Toronto, where she becomes a librarian—another position that places her midway, as it were, between literature and life. Throughout
The Hours
, as throughout
Mrs. Dalloway
, it's the women who are strong, who choose life, who survive.

 

And so Cunningham's novel is a very interesting form of “adaptation” indeed: much more than being merely a clever repository of allusions to its model (although these are many and dazzling, and make
The Hours
a kind of scholarly treasure hunt for Woolf lovers), it transposes into a different key, as it were, the constituent elements of Woolf's novel, for the purposes of a serious literary investigation of large (and distinctively Woolfian) themes—the nature of creativity, the role of literature in life, the authentic feel of everyday living.

Cunningham has, indeed, found just the right equivalents in today's world for many of the elements you find in
Mrs. Dalloway
. Take that famous head, for example—the apparition, in Woolf's book, that serves
as symbol for the world that is made by men, for men's literature and men's values—the great world, with its preoccupation with importance and fame and status. In Woolf's novel, people wonder who that briefly glimpsed head could belong to—“the Queen's, the Prince of Wales's, the Prime Minister's?” In Cunningham's book, the scene is replicated, but this time the VIPs come from a slightly different milieu. “Meryl Streep?” they wonder. “Vanessa Redgrave?”

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 con
sciousness 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:

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—but 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.”