THE HOURS d: Stephen Daldry

The Hours (2002)

Director: Michael Mann. Screenplay: David Hare, from Michael Cunningham’s novel. 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

THE BOOK OF FATE

Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman in The Hours Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer-winning The Hours uses Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway as the link that binds its three leading female characters. Far apart in terms of time and space, those three disturbed, unhappy women have in common both the deadness of a life of self-abnegation and the living, breathing 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 good as the suicidal Virginia Woolf; and Philip Glass, whose beautifully haunting score, alive with longing and soulfulness, is perhaps The Hours’s most important character.

David Hare’s 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 propel the development of the three disparate but interconnected storylines. In 1923, as the severely depressed Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) creates the characters and the situations found in Mrs. Dalloway, we witness those very characters come to life decades later, in other corners of the world. 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 (Meryl 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 utterly 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, 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 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 who has had all her emotions buried deep inside, Moore opted to create a character totally devoid of any feelings. Laura’s face is a permanent blank, and a close look into her eyes merely shows an extension of that blankness. That is hardly the way to create a live human being, let alone a complex one with whom we are supposed to sympathize.

Another character that fails to win our sympathy is Richard Brown, who is little more than your average movie AIDS victim. The highly capable Ed Harris is thus stuck with playing Richard as a three-note character: angry, angrier, angriest. Never do we sense that Richard is having his mental faculties destroyed by the disease.

On the other hand, Meryl Streep 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 — while neglecting her own life — but Streep makes a potentially unsympathetic character likable by bringing forth Clarissa’s vulnerability and her desperate need to both give and receive love.

In her 25-year career, Meryl Streep has created countless great portrayals of all types of women, so we have come to expect continuous excellence from her. Nicole Kidman, however, is a different matter. True, she displayed a solid comic talent in Gus Van Sant’s quirky To Die For back in 1995, but her film career always seemed more of an offshoot of her marriage to Tom Cruise than a result of her on-screen achievements. Following a much hyped (and quite mannered) performance in Moulin Rouge!, Kidman reveals a quieter, more introspective side of her in The Hours.

As a plus, instead of the plasticky makeup Kidman has used in her other roles (including her destitute heroine in the purportedly gritty Cold Mountain), she has an ugly fake nose plastered on her face for this one. Whether the fake nose possessed magical properties, we don’t know, but Kidman — though no Virginia Woolf replica — has never looked as interesting or acted as movingly. With a glance, she is able to convey in heartbreaking fashion Woolf’s yearnings for freedom from her constraining life, while her lowered tones add gravity to the precarious psychological state of her character.

Finally, to her belong the two emotional highlights of the film: the first, when Woolf and her niece, while in the midst of a lush forest, focus on the the body of a dead bird, a symbol of the ever-present reality of death; and the second, at the film’s end, when death itself engulfs her in the waters of the River Ouse. (Woolf actually killed herself in 1941, sixteen years after the publication of Mrs. Dalloway. She was 59 years old.)

While those and other scenes in The Hours overflow with beauty and poetry (with the assistance of both Philip Glass’ music and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey’s soft, melancholy hues), neither adapter David Hare nor director Stephen Daldry fully succeeds in patching up several puzzling holes in the narrative.

When Richard kills himself, for instance, I felt no sympathy for him. That is partly because we know him only as a bitter, sour man, but it is mostly because he decides, with what seems like a totally clear head, to jump out the window right in front of Clarissa — and for no apparent reason. (Except that a shell-shocked poet in Mrs. Dalloway also jumps out a window to his death.)

Clarissa’s relationship with her female lover is another major narrative gap. We are never told what made Clarissa search for the companionship of women, considering that her greatest love had been Richard, and that she had been married to another man and had raised a daughter (Claire Danes, giving the most amateurish performance in the film). True, Mrs. Dalloway was quite probably a lesbian, but this particular connection to the 21st century Clarissa is too tenuous to be convincing.

And I hope that the story does not imply that Richard "became" a gay man because of his mother’s negligence — or worse, because he witnessed her kissing the mouth of her beloved neighbor, Kitty (Toni Collette). The insinuations are there, though no overt rationalizations are forthcoming.

Although sections of The Hours are unsatisfying, the whole packs a major emotional wallop. Life, The Hours implies, may not be ours to live. Our fate has been sealed long before we were born. Perhaps Virginia Woolf’s own tragic fate had already been written by another author, in some past century, in some far away place. A disturbing — and perhaps silly — notion that in no way detracts from the real drama, the magnificent score, or the two first-rate performances The Hours has to offer.

Synopsis:

Three women are connected through time and space via a novel: Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

In the English countryside of the early 1920s, the depressive and suicidal Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), attempts to recover from a nervous breakdown by working on Mrs. Dalloway, a novel in which she chronicles a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a woman whose obsession on throwing a party is disrupted by remembrances of things past. Despite her newly flourishing creativity, Woolf’s depression worsens even as her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), struggles to help her.

In the Los Angeles of the early 1950s, suburban housewife and mother Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is reading Mrs. Dalloway. When she finds out that her neighbor (Toni Collette) may be suffering from a fatal illness, Laura expresses her love for the woman and then suffers a nervous breakdown. She abandons her son and husband, and sets out to kill herself.

In New York at the dawn of the 21st century, bisexual literary editor Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) is obsessed with throwing a party for her former boyfriend Richard Brown (Ed Harris), an AIDS-stricken author who has just won a prestigious literary award. In the meantime, Clarissa must deal with her jealousy of Richard’s current lover, Louis Waters (Jeff Daniels), and with Richard’s burning desire to end it all.

Notes:

For the 2001 segment, Betsy Blair (1955 Academy Award nominee as nest supporting actress for Marty) played the role of the elderly Laura Brown. However, director Stephen Daldry was dissatisfied with the results and replaced Blair with Julianne Moore covered in ageing makeup. I haven’t seen the Betsy Blair footage, but I’m willing to bet that Daldry should have stuck to it.

"The Hours" was the original working title of Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway.

THE INSIDER

THE FAMILY STONE

HOTEL RWANDA

KINSEY

THE DOOR IN THE FLOOR

THE LETTER

LORD JIM

LEMONY SNICKET’S A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS

THE BLACK DAHLIA

WALK THE LINE

by Andre Soares | October 21, 2004 | Filed Under American Cinema / Hollywood, Film Reviews, Gay & Lesbian

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