Vita & Virginia
Chanya Button’s “Vita & Virginia” is a very standard, generic period love story, but thankfully, there is a wonderful performance by Elizabeth Debicki at its center that keeps us engaged, and she has a partner in Gemma Arterton whom keeps the spark going when the story kind of fizzles into cliches.
Button’s film is inspired by the friendship-turned-love affair between Vita Sackville-West (Arterton’s character) and Virginia Woolf, played by Debicki, who really came onto the scene last year in “Widows” after roles in “The Tale” and “Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2,” among others. The screenplay by Button and Eileen Atkins is based on personal letters each woman sent to one another, and they provide the emotional anchor for a story that basically charts the ups and downs of the relationship between the two women. There are moments of sensual power here, but the film isn’t about bodice-ripping lesbian love, and is better for it. The film has very real consequences and scandal for these two to give in to their desires, but it also doesn’t paint the relationship with simple brush strokes, either.
One of the things I find most fascinating in “Vita & Virginia” is how it looks at the dynamics between the two women creatively. Both women are authors. Vita writes bawdier, “trashier,” books that sell better, but have given her a reputation that is something of an embarrassment to her mother (Isabella Rossellini); they fit her sensibilities, and her friends are of a more bohemian group who are more experimental and free wheeling. Woolf, Vita acknowledges, is the far superior writer, but her books do not really sell. Her circle is more conservative in how they view societal roles, and Vita, though awakening some life in Virginia, is a bit out of step with them, in that regards. The way Button approaches this part of their relationship is richly complicated and has some of the best character moments in the film, because it really shows how these two women, very confident in who they are, came together, came to respect one another, and came to have a profound impact on one another. This part of the narrative is where “Vita & Virginia” really shines as storytelling, and character development.
Films such as this follow very specific creative choices, and it’s in its themes it covers, and performances, where it rises and falls. There is not a false note by any of the actors in support of the main women in this film, but it is those two women that keep us interested in the story. Arterton has the weaker role of the two, as Vita exists as little more than a muse for Woolf to write the book that changed the trajectory of her career, Orlando, but the actress inhabits this woman of self-confidence and infatuation with smolder and genuine affection. For Debicki, however, this is a triumphant performance, as I feel as though I get to know Woolf in this movie beyond a name that is iconic. I could not help but think back to Nicole Kidman’s Oscar-winning role as the author in “The Hours,” but Debicki’s work here is on another level. We see the emotionally-still woman she is known for, but we also see how Vita has an impact on her when they come together, and the life that comes to Woolf when she is inspired to write about their relationship together. They are the beating heart of a film that would be hard pressed to have one, otherwise.
