How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken by Daniel Mendelsohn Read Free Book Online

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.
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    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