Movie Review:

The Hours

    Like the novel from which it draws both thematic and plot elements, Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours takes place in the course of one day.  More accurately, it takes place in the course of one day in the lives of each of three women in different time periods.  There is Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), who lives in the present and whose first name is the same as that of the novel's title character; there is Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a 1950s housewife who is reading the novel; and there is Virginia herself (Nicole Kidman), who is writing the novel in 1923.

    Drawing from the novel, Clarissa is busy preparing for a party, in this case for a former lover and still good friend, Richard Brown (Ed Harris), a poet who is dying of AIDS.  Like Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa is worried her party will be a failure.  It doesn't take much to make the connection here, though - aside from the fact that Richard refers to Clarissa as "Mrs. Dalloway," there's the sequence in which we see Virginia writing the opening line ("Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself"), Laura reading it, and then Clarissa actually speaking it.

    Woolf wrote herself into the novel in an oblique fashion as the character Septimus, a veteran who was shell-shocked in World War I who kills himself rather than be taken to the country to a rest home.  When Mrs. Dalloway hears of the suicide, she blames the men who wanted to move Septimus for making him feel that life was intolerable.  In some ways, then, Mrs. Dalloway is Woolf's suicide note, as she also could not stand the quietness of the country despite the doctors' insistence that it was better for her, though she did not kill herself until 15 years after the book was written.

    The Hours opens with this suicide, as Woolf weights herself down with stones and wades into the river near her home in Sussex, England, in 1941.  Following this, the other three time periods (1923, 1951, 2001) are established and their characters' relatedness emphasized.

    Richard's name also comes from Mrs. Dalloway, though in the book he is Mr. Dalloway.  In The Hours, Richard is a friend of Clarissa's, but one whom she dotes on to the extent that her own life seems inconsequential; she may love him more than she loves her daughter Julia (Claire Danes) or lover Sally (Allison Janney).  Clarissa's main wish is for Richard to stay alive, but it is more selfish a wish than she realizes or is willing to admit.

    Laura, meanwhile, feels she does not belong in the housewife role.  She loves her son, but it's not clear how she feels about her husband, and she suddenly kisses her neighbor Kitty (Toni Collette) in full view of her son.  Feeling inadequate over her inability to bake a cake and embarrassed over her husband's profession that he envisioned this life as his happiness, Laura considers killing herself just as we see Virginia consider having Mrs. Dalloway kill herself over something trivial.  As Laura imagines her hotel room filling with water, Virginia changes her mind and Laura decides not to go through with it.

    That scene, however, is typical of the overly didactic nature of many of the edits made in The Hours.   Director Stephen Daldry seems anxious to play up the connections between the later characters and Woolf's writing, and so makes some cuts a bit too heavy-handed, making connections for the viewer that might already have been obvious.

    The Hours is also very melodramatic, with Philip Glass' repetitive score punctuating scenes in which one of the main characters is having an emotional breakdown (and just about every other scene; this is one of the more intrusive scores in recent movie memory).  Fortunately, the three actresses charged with these duties perfrom them well.  Kidman, who is barely recognizable, delivers a fine portrait of a woman teetering on the edge of sanity; Moore takes a practically one-dimensional character and manages to flesh Laura out, though the extent to which she is depressed with her life is still quite extreme and overshadows any other character traits; Streep gives her second strong performance of the year (after her supporting turn in Adaptation) as a woman who thinks through someone else - not only does she want to take care of Richard, she believes everything he believes about her, namely that she is trivializing herself by focusing so much on him.  Her recognition does not give her any power to control it, though.

    It's melodramatic, yes, and its editing is a tad suspect, but the worst thing about The Hours is its set of main characters, none of whom seem to change throughout the movie.  Virginia never likes the country, even though it is supposed to be easier on her mental faculties, and eventually kills herself over that fact.  Laura's depression (and apparent sexual confusion) lead her to a decision whose effects trickle down into the 2001 storyline, where Clarissa only changes right at the end, and only because she has been effectively forced to do so.

    Three women unhappy with their lives, who ruin others' as a result.  Sounds like the feel-good movie of the year, doesn't it?  Make no mistake: The Hours is a pretty depressing experience.  There's certainly nothing uplifting here; one feels sorry for the men involved - Leonard and Dan especially, as neither can say anything that has any bearing on the mindsets of Virginia and Laura, who have made up their minds as to how they do and do not want to live.

    Numerous strong performances - the three leads, not to mention Ed Harris' supporting turn - keep The Hours moving.  They can't, however, hide its message, which appears to be that one's own life is the only one that should ever be treated as relevant.  B-

The Hours is a Paramount release.  Rated for mature thematic elements, some disturbing images and brief language.