I doubt that any film version of "Mrs Dalloway" can convey the breadth, depth, complexity, and radical vision of Virginia Woolf's novel. Although Gorris's version of it does seem to surpass typical expectations--and can stand on its own right as a rare adult character study movie, it still lacks Woolf's punch when it comes to dealing with her raw reality, her human presences, and her attacks on the bloodless psychiatric profession. Gorris is mainstream saddled, but more critically, she's limited by images that cannot take the measure of either the experimental content or more committed thoughts which only written forms can account for. For instance, there are more generics in the movie version, more single note characters and situations. And while Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith are the exclusive possessors of embodied consciousness and memory in the movie, this is hardly the case with the book.
I guess to comprehend what's going on (not easy because the movie's past--a simultaneous time period, seems a bit arbitrary, and character physical mismatches are not helpful) it's important to know that Woolf herself led something of a double life. Socially, she tended to hover on the surface as more of a performer or entertainer--and thus the "snob" epithet that is oft hurled her way; but privately she was, of course, the deeply conscious writer and thinker plagued with recurring mental illness, attempted suicides, and marriage upheavals which were so critical to the self she understood to be both real and dark.
Woolf wrote "Mrs Dalloway" as perhaps both an escape from her more tormented self and from the fashion of post-war disillusionment. Indeed, Mrs. Dalloway, the vibrant, party-loving social mediator, who Woolf herself, if not for certain life turns, could have become, initially stood alone in Woolf's novel. But this sunny version could not be tolerated. For Woolf, the writer, knew and understood too much of reality, too much of the war's devastation, too much of the underclass, and too much of the ice cold world of psychiatry, to let the party woman Clarissa's vibrancy take hold. Septimus Warren Smith was introduced to the novel not only as her counter figure, but also as a crucial part of Mrs Dalloway's consciousness without which she would be too glib, too shallow, too lacking in a sense of self.
One telling example of how the movie cannot handle the novel's radicalism is its take on Septimus Warren Smith's guilt. Gorris offers Smith's hallucinogenic encounters with Evans, which are both gripping and melodramatic, as the obvious causation (shell-shock) of his mental breakdown. But in Woolf's text what's more at stake for Smith is his emotional abandonment of his Italian wife, Rezia. Septimus, his war traumas not withstanding, exerts his own form of trauma onto his wife. It's this act of dehumanization, more personal than war, in which he shuts down communication with and discards his only ally, that drives his guilt. This is not a false self-blame, but a true self -blame, and a true guilt. But that such disengagement is socially acceptable and thus totally outside the narrow scope of his acquisitive, neurosis-classifiers psychiatrists, who deny any bitter complexities, only compounds his madness. So, Septimus' productive guilt, which should be most amenable to treatment, gets stifled by a power-based professional elite. And who understood this perverse, anti-human corps of experts better than Virginia Woolf, the writer, and author of the novel "Mrs. Dalloway," who was also thought to be lacking in proportion, and unable to adjust.
