The Hours Review
by David N. Butterworth (dnb AT dca DOT net)January 21st, 2003
THE HOURS
A film review by David N. Butterworth
Copyright 2003 David N. Butterworth
**1/2 (out of ****)
In 1923, a chain-smoking Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is fretfully ruminating
over the beginnings of a novel that will eventually become her opus "Mrs. Dalloway."
In 1951, pregnant housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is obsessively reading
the novel while fretting over her husband's birthday party preparations, and in 2001 Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) is living the life of Dalloway, a big city socialite fretting over a party she too is about to host.
Three women, three separate stories, each one linked, either directly or indirectly, to the writings of Ms. Woolf. That's the construct behind director
Stephen Daldry's ("Billy Elliot") latest film and there's much to admire here, including performances worthy of our attention. "The Hours" is never as engrossing
as it ought to be, however, because its stories never really connect.
In the contemporary segment Clarissa (played with verisimilitude by Streep),
a New York editor, attends to her former lover Richard (Ed Harris), a brilliant
novelist who has taken ten years to write his latest book, about as long as Clarissa has been in a committed relationship with another woman (Allison Janney,
convincing in blue jeans). Richard, who left Clarissa for another man (a paunchy
Jeff Daniels, whom I mistook for Ron Perlman in the trailer) and likes to refer
to his ex as Mrs. Dalloway since Clarissa shares many of the attributes of Woolf's
eponymous heroine, is now dying of AIDS in his lifeless Manhattan apartment.
In 1950's Los Angeles, Laura's feelings for her husband (the ubiquitous John C. Reilly) and son (an excellent Jack Rovello) are ambiguous at best. Laura's more-than-neighborly embrace with her trussed-up friend Kitty (a ghastly-looking
Toni Collette; good though) is the catalyst that drives her towards a tragic--and
irreversible--decision.
Since Woolf's book touches on the significance of a same sex kiss it follows
that Laura, for one, would be party to such a life-altering act. Clarissa's openly gay lifestyle aside there is, of course, Woolf's own documented bi-sexuality
to contend with--there's a moment in the film in which the author locks lips with her sister (played by Miranda Richardson) a little too persuasively.
Similarly the theme of suicide runs throughout Daldry's film like a chronometer
marking the hours. Laura contemplates it, Clarissa witnesses it and, in the film's prologue set in 1941, a cognitive Woolf wades into a Sussex river, her pockets stuffed with rocks, and drowns herself. This is not the feel-good movie
of the summer that's for sure.
Daldry intercuts the stories more deliberately in the early going, matching
shot against shot--breakfast arrangements here, a gesture or an aside or a door
opening there--but less so as the film progresses, since his themes--of displacement,
despair, and death--do the matching for him. It's as if Daldry has taken three
separate films--a creative process fueled biography ala "Iris," a "Far from Heaven" redo with Moore's character once again struggling with repressed homosexuality
in picture-perfect suburbia, and a standard New York melodrama in which characters
throw flowers into huge vases without the need to arrange them--and asked us to extract some meaning from the overlaps, the inter-relationships.
All three women sport fantastic noses though. Kidman's is clearly a prosthetic
one but at no time does she struggle under the weight of it (an Oscar® nomination
is a given and she'll most likely win it). Moore's performance is more detached;
she brings a glazy-eyed aloofness to her Laura Brown and I hate to say it but I'm beginning to tire of her freckled blandness. Streep is typically solid yet there are equally strong performances to be found in the smaller roles--Claire
Danes breathes life into an underwritten, sympathetic part of Clarissa's daughter
Julia and Stephen Devane is terrific as Leonard Woolf, the publisher struggling
with his wife's encroaching madness.
Perhaps it's telling that the film's most impressive set piece, visually speaking, is a dream sequence and that its most emotionally effective scene (when Leonard confronts Virginia at the train station) was changed from the original novel. In addition there's an intriguing "twist" towards the end of the film that helps clarify some of its characters desires and motivations but it's not enough to pull everything together. Philip Glass's brooding, minimalist
score propels the "action" along, its intense, swirling piano themes forever in evidence, constantly adding to the misery of the piece. Oh no--we've stumbled
into "The Hours-qatsi"!
Dark, dour, and just plain depressing, Daldry's earnest but
overly-complicated
"The Hours" (based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham) never really lets us in nor offers up, alas, very much hope for the future.
--
David N. Butterworth
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