`Mrs. Dalloway' Is Vivid, Moving Interpretation Of Woolf's Novel

Movie review XXX 1/2 "Mrs. Dalloway," with Vanessa Redgrave, Natascha McElhone, Rupert Graves, Michael Kitchen, Alan Cox. Directed by Marleen Gorris, from a script by Eileen Atkins. 98 minutes. Harvard Exit. "PG-13" - Parental guidance advised because of emotional elements and brief nudity.

Aside from using her name in the title of a Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor blockbuster, the movies haven't done much with Virginia Woolf. "To the Lighthouse" became a little-noticed TV film in 1983, and "Orlando" was turned into a minor art-house hit a few years ago.

But "Mrs. Dalloway," based on a 1925 Woolf novel, could be the kind of accessible breakthrough movie that transformed Jane Austen, Henry James and E.M. Forster into marquee names during the past decade.

It's a lucid, moving dramatization of the persistence of memory that has much in common with another movie about a large party and its philosophical aftermath: John Huston's 1987 adaptation of James Joyce's "The Dead."

Like the suddenly reflective wife in "The Dead," the outwardly proper Mrs. Dalloway finds herself forced by circumstance to remember and reconsider a lost love. This time, however, he's actually present at the party, and his arrival earlier in the day helps to unleash a stream of memories about the reasons why she chose not to marry him.

Vanessa Redgrave plays Clarissa Dalloway as the aging party-giver, while in extended flashbacks Natascha McElhone plays

her younger self, the debutante Clarissa, who must choose between the restless Peter Walsh (Alan Cox) and the more conventional politician, Richard Dalloway (Robert Portal). Still discontent and still in love with her, Peter returns years later in the form of Michael Kitchen, while Richard has become a Parliament member played by John Standing.

It isn't difficult to understand her regrets. Peter, especially as Kitchen portrays him, does make the status quo look dull. On the other hand, Standing's Richard is a caring husband who has been able to provide his wife with stability - something for which the moody Peter seems ill-equipped.

Drifting in and out of these scenes is a seemingly unrelated story about a shellshocked ex-soldier, Septimus Warren Smith (Rupert Graves), who can't stop reliving the horrors of World War I in his mind. The film, like the novel, eventually draws his war consciousness into the Dalloway party, which takes place in the summer of 1923, five years after the end of the war.

The movie is clearly a labor of love on the part of three women: Gorris, the Oscar-winning Dutch filmmaker ("Antonia's Line") who had never read Woolf before; Eileen Atkins, a longtime Woolf fan who had adapted her work for the stage; and Redgrave, who had acted with Atkins in her play about Woolf, "Vita and Virginia."

Gorris' direction brings a freshness to the interpretation that perhaps only an outsider could provide. Atkins' screenplay deftly finds a way to dramatize the interior monologues that drive the book, while maintaining the memories that are its backbone. Redgrave vividly expresses both Mrs. Dalloway's outward elegance and the storm within, and she's backed up by a first-rate supporting cast.

Standing, Kitchen and Lena Headey (as Clarissa's young friend Sally Seton) are particularly impressive. But it is Graves' deeply felt performance as the tortured veteran that takes the film a long way from the "Masterpiece Theatre" approach that could have undermined this fine adaptation.