We first meet Orlando as a ravishing young man who captures the fancy of England's fading Queen Elizabeth I (Quentin Crisp in Tudor drag -- very arch, very forlorn, very touching). Orlando then falls in love with a Muscovite princess, who breaks his heart. To recuperate, he serves as a diplomat in Morocco, where the miraculous transformation takes place. ("Same person," says the now womanly Orlando, surveying her body without a trace of surprise, "different sex.") He, now she, returns to Restoration England an exquisite beauty moving gingerly beneath a tall pile of hair, then goes on to spend intensely romantic moments with an American adventurer (Zane) in the age of Victoria. Orlando finally finds success, in the here and the now, as a writer and single mother. When we leave her, she is crying with happiness.
Potter's adaptation is a lightly floating fantasy about a feminine spirit who finally gets the body and the life she wants. This Orlando is part sexual karma, part sexual politics and part historical pageant. But that's only a scintilla of what Woolf is after in her novel, which manages to be about the life of a soul, the birth of an artist and the broad, majestic realm of English literature. The fact is, Orlando him- or herself isn't all that interesting.
Perhaps this is why, after a glorious beginning, the movie goes flat for long stretches. Orlando doesn't come fully to life again until a stunning shot of the 19th-century Lady Orlando running through a fog-bound field, her voluminous gown dragging behind in the wet grass. Woolf herself would have been thrilled: You can just imagine her in a darkened theater, so roiled by emotion she spills her popcorn.