Posted: 01/03/03

The Hours (2002)
by Joe Steiff

Based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours interweaves the stories of three women - a book editor in New York (Streep), a young mother in California (Moore) and author Virginia Woolf (Kidman).

Granted, The Hours is not your typical Hollywood narrative. Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer-prize winning novel from which the film is adapted is a literary construction that serves as variations on a theme - the theme being Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway. If you love or admire Woolf's writing, particularly Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham's novel is a wonder of shifting references, alternatives and echoes.

This doesn't mean that you have to be familiar with Mrs. Dalloway in order to partake in the beautiful craftsmanship of The Hours as it anchors its dramatic web to each of its main characters. The story captured resonates not just with Woolf's writings but with life itself.

With a script by David Hare (an accomplished director as well as screenwriter), the film version follows the novel's basic construction of intertwining a single day in three women's stories despite their living in different eras. The film shifts back and forth among the three women as each embarks upon a day that will not so much change her life as bring it into sharp focus.

In a story line vaguely reminiscent of Parting Glances (1986), Meryl Streep portrays Clarissa Vaughn, a book editor living in contemporary New York City with her lover Sally (Allison Janney). Affectionately called 'Mrs. Dalloway' by friend and long-ago lover Richard (Ed Harris), she spends her day preparing a party to celebrate his winning a major poetry prize. He initially refuses to attend, claiming he's won the prize not for his talent but simply for surviving with AIDS. But underneath is the suspicion that surviving is not enough. That the very notion of "surviving" links one continually to the past, to that which has been survived. We find Richard with a past he has already hashed over in his novel and poems, a past he is done examining. No wonder he doesn't want to attend the party. As the day progresses, the past intrudes more and more into Clarissa's world, with the arrival of her daughter (Claire Danes), Richard's more recent and significant ex-lover (Jeff Daniels) and, finally, Richard's estranged mother, the monster who haunts his novel, his poetry, his life.

Several decades earlier, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), an ill-at-ease '50s suburban California housewife, has begun reading Mrs. Dalloway as she contemplates how best to celebrate her husband's birthday. While her husband (John C. Reilly) is at work, she and her son (Jack Rovello) decide to bake him a cake, something any suburban housewife should be able to do with no problem. But that is the problem, because Laura doesn't comfortably fit into the suburban mold. She stands (or sits) in bland contrast to the quintessential very-much-at-ease Kitty (Toni Collette), who stops by unexpectedly, slowly tilting Laura's world off-balance with her forced cheerfulness and denial. It is with Kitty's visit that Laura begins to recognize the confines of her own life and to develop an escape plan. Her intuitive son understands more than he is able to express, and ultimately he is unable to comfort her or stop her.

Nearly thirty years further in the past, in the early 1920s, Virginia Woolf finds the first sentence that will grow into her novel Mrs. Dalloway as she struggles to make peace with her doctor-ordered exile from London and London society, living instead in the suburbs under the guardianship of her husband (Stephen Dillane) and house staff. The early arrival of her sister (Miranda Richardson) throws her day off as she ruminates about Mrs. Dalloway's fate before committing it to paper.

These three women's lives and stories are bookended and contained between several brief scenes of Virginia Woolf's suicide in 1941 as she fills her pockets with stones so that she will more easily sink to the bottom of the nearby river.

The Hours contains an amazing cast all at their best. Streep is exceptional, as always, though her turn in Adaptation may ultimately be considered more memorable. Harris has taken more risks in the past few years than ever before, and his performance as Richard works best in its quietest moments, such as his confusion on whether he's already attended the awards ceremony. Moore is at her finest, heartbreaking and real, especially in her final scenes, a performance equal (and connected at some Meta level) to her work in Far From Heaven. Collette and Dillane are brilliant as well. Every single actor in this film shines. But it is Kidman who so completely embraces the material that I feel as if I have met Virginia Woolf and would gladly spend a day with her (or at least the entire film). Certainly Kidman's adjusted appearance makes her hard to recognize, but there is an "otherness" in this performance far from anything I've seen from Kidman before. Each expression, each utterance, each gesture brings to life this woman confined by her relationships, doctors, society and perhaps her own madness.

As Stephen Daldry's second directorial feature, The Hours is a much more sophisticated film than his first (Billy Elliot), though that first film has a more immediate and traditional emotional story core. At first glance, it may seem incongruous that the director of Billy Elliot would choose something like The Hours as his follow up.

Billy Elliot is a romanticized (and child-like) film of pursuing your dreams: find your passion and all will fall in place. The film looks ahead to the future with optimism - the best is yet to come.

The Hours is a film exploring the other end of the spectrum. What happens when all the pieces have fallen into place but you don't like the completed puzzle? The Hours is filled with the aftermath of compromise. And second-guessing those decisions. For all of its conscious construction, Stephen Daldry has brought to the screen a counterpoint to Billy Elliot, a film in which each of the characters looks back, fearing the best has already passed them by.

Some of the disgruntlement with The Hours may be that its formal construction is not hidden in the ways we have been trained to expect. Motifs and coincidences and resonances compound throughout the film, adding another layer beyond story logic. The film is highly formal, in film terms, but it is not any more constructed than Far From Heaven or Punch Drunk Love or even Triple XXX. The difference is that The Hours wears its construction like an exoskeleton for all to see. Literary critics seem more forgiving of such a device than film critics.

The Hours is a thoughtful film. I don't mean it's full of ideas, but it is a film that considers how ideas are expressed and designed. When Time magazine describes the film as pretentious, the years seem to shift back to an earlier day when phrases like "intellectual" and "cultural elite" were used as clubs. There's no doubt that the film (like the novel) attempts to provide intellectual pleasure as well as emotional pleasure. It's a shame that at this point in our culture, calling a film cerebral more than likely damns it to being avoided rather than embraced; to be considered "the worst" rather than the best.

Joe Steiff loves good ol' emotional stories as much as the next guy, but he doesn't mind thinking once in a while.