It’s always extra frustrating when a biopic falls short, especially if its subject is as compelling as the relationship between two brilliant iconoclasts like Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.
It’s a shame, too, that many in the audience will get their introduction to Sackville-West via “Vita and Virginia.” In reality, she was an extraordinarily complicated, trailblazing bisexual writer who lived on her own terms regardless of the price to herself or others in her orbit. Here, she comes across as a spoiled and superficial narcissist who is merely, as one character intones amid the film’s plethora of plummy accents, “rahthah hard work.”
As played by Gemma Arterton (also an executive producer), Vita is pure seductress: gorgeous and tempestuous and shockingly modern even by the most decadent standards of 1927. She’s irresistible, in other words, for the contemplative, always-questing Virginia. But Virginia’s Bloomsbury set isn’t as easily swayed.
It’s a shame, too, that many in the audience will get their introduction to Sackville-West via “Vita and Virginia.” In reality, she was an extraordinarily complicated, trailblazing bisexual writer who lived on her own terms regardless of the price to herself or others in her orbit. Here, she comes across as a spoiled and superficial narcissist who is merely, as one character intones amid the film’s plethora of plummy accents, “rahthah hard work.”
As played by Gemma Arterton (also an executive producer), Vita is pure seductress: gorgeous and tempestuous and shockingly modern even by the most decadent standards of 1927. She’s irresistible, in other words, for the contemplative, always-questing Virginia. But Virginia’s Bloomsbury set isn’t as easily swayed.
- 8/22/2019
- by Elizabeth Weitzman
- The Wrap
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