A Woolf in chic clothing
Vita & Virginia (12A) Verdict: Overly theatrical
OF ALL the actresses to have played the great modernist writer Virginia Woolf, an illustrious list which includes Eileen Atkins, Vanessa Redgrave and Nicole Kidman (who won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Woolf in 2002’s The Hours), Elizabeth Debicki might be the most astutely cast.
Debicki first captured British attention — and how! — in the 2016 BBC drama The Night Manager.
She has done plenty since then, but her captivating performance in Vita & Virginia, an adaptation by Atkins of her own 1993 stage play about the tumultuous love affair between Woolf and her fellow novelist Vita Sackville-West, surely marks a career high.
It isn’t only her prodigious height — well over 6ft — that helps her command the screen. Debicki’s Woolf wafts through literary London with great majesty, but also desperate insecurity.
Somehow, she inhabits the role in a way that not even her fellow Australian Kidman managed . . . even with that famous prosthetic hooter.
The casting of Gemma Arterton as Vita is less successful. Arterton is as radiantly lovely as ever, and easily voluptuous enough to make us understand how the predatory, manipulative Vita so bewitched her female admirers, tempting even heterosexual women into bed.
But Vita was a true aristocrat, and Arterton, always so beguiling as a working-class English rose, has to work a little too hard at those cutglass Twenties vowels.
The film, despite director and cowriter Chanya Button’s cinematic flourishes, such as repeated closeups of Vita’s sensual mouth, never really detaches itself from its theatrical roots.
But it eloquently explains how Vita inspired Woolf’s visionary 1928 novel Orlando, about a gender swap poet, and how her mental instability made her, for all her enigmatic charisma at the heart of the Bloomsbury set, achingly vulnerable.
Vita’s disapproving mother is played splendidly by Isabella Rossellini, with Rupert Penry-Jones as her husband Harold Nicolson — the diplomat whose own homosexuality did not make it any easier for him to accept Vita’s promiscuity with women.