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The Hours (2002)
The Hours is a movie of three vaguely related storylines. The first involves the famous author Virginia Woolf in the 1920s. The second involves a 1950s suburban family where the wife is reading Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway. The third storyline is set in 2001 and revolves around a dying poet and the friend who cares for him. What the full connections are between these stories, I'll leave for you to learn. What I will say is that each story is dominated by a woman unhappy in her life and how she deals with that. The film hinges on the concept of Mrs. Dalloway, that a person's entire life can be told in a single day, as if that day can encapsulate the entire life like a fractal. The film effortlessly bounces about the trio of timelines, keeping us solidly grounded in each without confusion. Furthermore, the shifts allow the parallels in the stories to become visible.
The storyline set in the 1950s is almost pure torture. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is married, with a young child and another on the way. They live in a California surburbia and everything is just so perfect. Except of course that Laura is miserable. It takes forever to get some sense of why she's miserable though. In the meantime she's a basket case, jumpy, twitchy and generally unable to settle down. Moore turns in perhaps the greatest performance of being uncomfortable I've ever seen. The woman's discontent practically radiates off the screen. This leads to a steady stream of worried looks by the young son, who frankly gave me the creeps. He'd be perfect for one of those movies about demon children. The husband, played by the otherwise excellent John C. Reilly, seems to be made from plastic. The guy is as real as the air of quiet suburban moral perfection that tends to dominate our views of the era. Between the three of them, I was groaning every time this particular storyline made an appearance. The section's saving grace is a scene with a neighbor played by Toni Collette. This was a brief oasis of interest to an otherwise aggravating storyline.
The Woolf segment is easily the film's best. Nicole Kidman's portrayal of the famed writer is fabulous, portraying a woman suffering both physical and mental illness and yet never willing to back down. She constantly flies straight into the face of everything life can throw at her. Kidman vanishes into the role, giving no hint of her appearance or previous work. Woolf clearly makes everyone around her edgy. They want to help her but are afraid of offending, afraid of distracting from her writing and terrified of what she might do to herself in a bad moment. Stephane Dillane does a great job as her husband, a man caught between protecting her and letting her live happily.
The story set in present day features Meryl Streep playing Clarissa Vaughan, a woman who seems to be the living embodiment of Woolf's character Mrs. Dalloway, a woman who defines her own life in terms of the quality of dinner party she throws. She looks after a poet dying of AIDS and is preparing a party for him that is to follow a ceremony bestowing an award on him. His sanity is fading as rapidly as his health but he still can see right through her and makes a point of needling her incessantly with comments that hit far too close to home for her liking. Rattled, she stumbles through her day and eventually comes completely unraveled when a former lover of his comes to visit. If the 1950s story is the most aggravating, this one is the most perplexing. Streep's character is one we meet late in her story and have to spend the whole film trying to play catch up. I never really felt I had a satisfactory grip on who she was or why she lived as she did. At least with Laura Brown I could see that surburban family life was making her feel trapped. With Clarissa I couldn't figure out what made her feel trapped. She seemed to go out of her way to find that feeling. Ed Harris plays the poet and brings forth all the pain, bitterness and desperation you could imagine from such a character. Their exchanges add great life to the film. These segments had me sitting straight up.
Most of the movie gave me the feeling of having walked in half an hour late. With the exception of Woolf's story, I always felt that part of the story was missing and it was the part with all the important information. The film clearly wants to deal with issues of women and their standing in society, a standing that may leave them unfulfilled or feeling trapped by circumstance, unable to improve anything, struggling under a heavy burden. The problem for me is that it never tries to explain how these problems come about. The problem of facing up to society's demands of an individual is hardly unique to women but certainly the form it takes is. As a man I would have appreciated an insight into that and instead felt I only got the magnified view of the feeling of being trapped. Mostly it left me with tons of questions and no answers. I couldn't sympathize or understand because the film didn't provide an opportunity to know the women well enough. Perhaps women viewing the film will be able to immediately sympathize and find themselves up to speed promptly. For me it was fairly alienating.
I sat on this review for a couple weeks, trying to sort out why the film was being so solidly reviewed elsewhere. I acknowledge the spectacular acting in the film but still felt put off by the movie. It finally occurred to me that the problem was the very one that must have been most daunting to the screenwriter. How do you take a heavily internalized book and adapt it to a visual medium like film? Usually you don't try. But this is a case where the attempt is made and some of the strains are visible. I felt lost much of the time, not really understanding the feelings of the main characters. In a film we generally don't have the opportunity to know what a character is feeling. So whatever mental struggles these women faced, we could only guess at them. Because three storylines are employed, we never get enough time with anyone. If the film was dedicated to any one of them, I could have learned to understand their problems sufficiently to appreciate the film. That of course assumes I could ignore the film's score, a relentless piece that grated on my nerves. It mostly reminded me of the scene in Ghostbusters where Bill Murray's character endlessly repeats two notes on a piano because he says it irritates the ghosts. It irritates the living too, particularly when stretched to two hours.
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