"Vita & Virginia" - Film Review
Despite Virginia Woolf’s fame as an author in the early 1900s, not much is known about her decades-long love affair with fellow writer Vita Sackville-West. Both of the women spent their lives married to men, but their marriages were open to outside relationships. Vita & Virginia is an attempt to bring the details of their affair to light.
Adapted from Eileen Atkins’ 1992 play of the same name, Vita & Virginia was written and directed by Chayna Button. The main source of information and inspiration for both is the hundreds, if not thousands, of letters Vita and Virginia wrote to one another. Their love affair is what inspires Woolf to write her most famous work, Orlando. The film begins at the party where Vita and Virginia first meet and ends with the publication of Orlando and the subsequent end of their romantic relationship.
What makes Vita & Virginia work is the truly electric performances of Gemma Arterton and Elizabeth Debecki, as Vita and Virginia respectively. The movie really soars when it is at its most simple, when Debicki and Arterton take turns looking directly into the camera, quoting lines taken directly from the letters Woolf and Sackville-West wrote to one another. It’s easy to forget that these authors of well-known literature were real people with complicated lives and emotions. Stripping everything else away and focusing on the words of these old love letters shows the depth of the emotions these women had for one another.
Thunderbird Releasing
Unfortunately, the problem with this film is that the lives of the two women are too rich to be reduced to an almost-two-hour movie. There’s an attempt to address Woolf’s mental health in the script, but it offers no real insight. While simply called “madness” when she was alive, contemporary psychiatrists have speculated that Woolf suffered from bipolar disorder. She endured swings of severe depression and unbridled enthusiasm, before ultimately drowning herself in a river near her home. In the movie, her struggles with mental health are personified by flowers that appear at seemingly random times. There is, sadly, no further exploration of these issues.
Vita & Virginia tries too hard to cover too much ground. The relationship between the two women lasted for two decades and became a platonic friendship in the later years. The film includes their first meeting, their respective marriages, their writing careers, and more. It’s a lofty goal that Button, Debicki, and Arterton valiantly attempt to reach, but ultimately their efforts would have been better served in a miniseries. The story of Woolf and Sackville-West is too dense and too little-known to be accurately covered in a movie.
Some movies are able to rely on the audience’s prior knowledge of the subject and gloss over certain aspects of the story or the people being covered, but that’s unfortunately not the circumstance for Vita and Virginia’s love story. It’s relatively unknown, and the filmmakers were forced to spend a lot of time bringing the audience up to speed to make up for that. Make no mistake, the love affair and the personal lives of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West are stories that deserve to be told. While Vita & Virginia is an excellent place to start, it leaves the audience wanting so much more.
Follow me on BlueSky, Instagram, Letterboxd, & YouTube. Check out Movies with My Dad, a new podcast recorded on the car ride home from the movies.