THE HOURS Review Pt.2 – Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore

Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf in Stephen Daldry's The Hours

THE HOURS Review: Part I

Now, throughout her career Meryl Streep has created countless great portrayals of all types of women, so I 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 Kidman's film career always seemed more like 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 Cold Mountain), she has an ugly fake nose plastered on her face for this one. Whether the fake nose possessed magical properties, I 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, almost somber tones reflect 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; the second, at the film's end, when death itself engulfs Woolf 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. (I haven't read Michael Cunningham's book, so I don't know how many — if any — of those inconsistencies are found in the novel.)

When Ed Harris' Richard kills himself, for instance, I felt no sympathy for him. That was partly because I saw him only as a bitter, angry man, but it was mostly because Richard decides, with what seems like a perfectly clear head, to jump out the window right in front of Clarissa. That gesture has 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 problem. We are never told what made Clarissa search for the companionship of women, considering that her greatest love had been Richard, or that she had been married to another man and had raised a daughter (a poorly cast Claire Danes). True, Mrs. Dalloway was quite probably a lesbian, but this particular connection to the 21st century Clarissa is too tenuous to be convincing.

And finally, I sure hope Hare's screenplay (and/or Cunningham's book) is not subtly telling us that Richard "became" gay because of his mother's negligence. Or worse, because he, as a little boy, witnessed her kissing on the lips of her beloved neighbor, Kitty (Toni Collette). The insinuations are there; but thankfully, no overt rationalizations are forthcoming.

Although a number of elements in 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 human drama, the magnificent score, and the two first-rate performances The Hours has to offer.