THE HOURS (2002)
Direction: Stephen Daldry
Cast: Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, Toni Collette, Allison Janney, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Stephen Dillane, John C. Reilly, Miranda Richardson, Eileen Atkins
Screenplay: David Hare; from Michael Cunningham's novel
Nicole Kidman, The Hours
Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer-winning The Hours uses Virginia Woolf's 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway (working title: "The Hours") as the link that binds its three leading female characters. Far apart in terms of time and space, those three disturbed, unhappy women share both the deadness of a life of self-abnegation and the living reality of death itself.
Despite gaps in the narrative, Stephen Daldry's stabs at melodrama, and one poor central performance, The Hours stands as an intelligent and deeply moving achievement. Most of the credit for the film's success goes to Meryl Streep, outstanding as a 21st century Mrs. Dalloway; Nicole Kidman, surprisingly effective as the suicidal Virginia Woolf; and Philip Glass, whose haunting score, alive with longing, is perhaps The Hours' most important character.
Adapted by David Hare, the screenplay moves back and forth in time and space, jumping from the English countryside of the early 1920s to a Los Angeles suburb in the early 1950s, and to New York City at the dawn of the 21st century. The changes in settings both accompany and push forward the development of the three disparate but interconnected storylines.
In 1923, the severely depressed Virginia Woolf (Kidman) creates the characters and the situations found in Mrs. Dalloway. In 1951, Californian housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), is both reading Mrs. Dalloway and experiencing moments from that book in her own life. In 2001, Manhattan book editor Clarissa Vaughan (Streep), like Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway, is intent on throwing a party — in Vaughan's case, for her AIDS-stricken former boyfriend, Richard Brown (Ed Harris), to whom she is wholly devoted.
Each story has its points of interest, though Laura Brown's tale is the one weak link among the three. Apart from the fact that she coldly abandons her young son (who grows up to become Ed Harris' Richard Brown), Laura's predicament is little more than the old cliché about the woman who must find her true self away from the constraints of the male-dominated home. Julianne Moore's apathetic performance (a far cry from her sensitive portrayal in Far from Heaven that same year) fails to convey Laura's inner dilemmas — freedom vs. convention; self-love vs. maternal love.
Instead of playing Laura as a woman whose emotions are all deeply buried inside, Moore opted to create a character devoid of any feelings. Laura's face is a permanent blank; a close look into her eyes merely shows the expression(lessness) of that blankness. That is hardly the way to create a live human being, let alone a complex one with whom the viewer is supposed to empathize.
Another character that failed to win my sympathy was Richard Brown, who, as written and interpreted, comes across as little more than your average movie AIDS victim. Here, the usually capable Ed Harris plays Richard as a three-note character: angry, angrier, angriest. While watching Harris, never did I sense that Richard was having his mental faculties destroyed by the disease.
Meryl Streep, on the other hand, soars above the limitations of both her character and her director, handling several highly melodramatic scenes without ever resorting to either self-pity or over-the-top histrionics. Her Clarissa may be a controlling type — except when it comes to her own neglected life — but Streep makes a potentially unsympathetic character likable by bringing forth Clarissa's vulnerability and her desperate need to both give and receive affection.