The Hours
TV ClubHouse: archive: Movies Sept 2002 - April 2003:
The Hours
Muse | Sunday, January 26, 2003 - 09:02 pm     I'm a little torn on this one. There were *so* many wonderful performances. Not surprising considering the cast (which is quite an impressive list), however. It was also a very thoughtful and intelligent movie. There's three different stories that are interconnected in various ways (kind of interesting to pick up on that, especially at one point later in the film). And there's some serious underlying themes and messages. That being said, it was a movie that addressed stuff like depression and suicide, so it wasn't really what I'd call a "feel good" kind of film. Not exactly the most exciting movie in the world, either, since it's more of a character study than something with a fast-paced plot. It's something that women are a *lot* more likely to enjoy than men, although it depends on the woman...one lady behind me fell asleep (and snored!) a number of times, for example. lol - I can understand why some people might feel it drags. So basically I think a person would really enjoy it if they happen to be a) the type of person might enjoy a more philosophical/quiet film, and b) someone in the mood for that kind of movie. |
Mak1 | Monday, January 27, 2003 - 11:16 am     Good review Muse. I read the book and am looking forward to seeing it. In my comments about the book, I also felt it necessary to mention that the subject matter isn't for everyone. I'm chuckling at the woman snoring behind you, LOL. |
Mamaanja | Sunday, February 16, 2003 - 01:43 pm     I went to see this knowing nothing about it except that it starred Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore. I haven't decided if I enjoyed it or not. The performances were brillant, and it was extremely well done, but it was quite depressing. I really didn't like any of the main characters (except the little boy). I think, in a way, I need to like a character to be invested in their story. And I know it's silly, but Nicole Kidman's fake nose was quite distracting to me. Maybe it's because it looked like they took Tom Cruise's nose and put it on her face? I don't know. |
Juju2bigdog | Tuesday, February 25, 2003 - 05:40 pm     I saw this movie and left the theater confused. I really wasn't sure what it was about. I finally came to the conclusion that it was sort of like Kiss of the Spider Woman. Three stories, all the same story. In this case, three different outcomes because they take place in different times. I wasn't sure if the underlying theme was homosexuality or not. The main characters depressions were not at all explained. I thought Ed Harris did a superb job with his character. |
Babyruth | Tuesday, February 25, 2003 - 05:49 pm     Here, Juju, maybe this will help make some sense of it (it helped me): December 27, 2002 Who's Afraid Like Virginia Woolf? By STEPHEN HOLDEN In "The Hours" Nicole Kidman tunnels like a ferret into the soul of a woman besieged by excruciating bouts of mental illness. As you watch her wrestle with the demon of depression, it is as if its torment has never been shown on the screen before. Directing her desperate, furious stare into the void, her eyes not really focusing, Ms. Kidman, in a performance of astounding bravery, evokes the savage inner war waged by a brilliant mind against a system of faulty wiring that transmits a searing, crazy static into her brain. But since that woman is the English writer Virginia Woolf (a prosthetic nose helps Ms. Kidman achieve an uncanny physical resemblance), her struggle is a losing battle. On March 28, 1941, Woolf, hounded by inner voices while in the throes of her fourth breakdown, put a stone in her pocket and drowned herself in the Ouse River near the English country house she shared with her husband, Leonard. And in the opening scene of "The Hours," the eloquent, somber screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham's meditation on that suicide (it won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for fiction), Woolf scrawls an anguished farewell letter to her husband, then hurries into the muddy water like Joan of Arc embracing the fire, accompanied by the churning, ethereal strains of Philip Glass's score. The deeply moving film, directed by Stephen Daldry ("Billy Elliot") from a screenplay by David Hare that cuts to the bone, is an amazingly faithful screen adaptation of a novel that would seem an unlikely candidate for a movie. A delicate, layered reflection that skips around through time, "The Hours," which opens today in New York, is Mr. Cunningham's homage to Woolf's first great novel, "Mrs. Dalloway," published in 1925. Woolf's novel details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a conventional upper-class Englishwoman giving a party, who experiences nagging intimations of the more adventurous life she might have led. On the same day, Septimus Warren Smith, a character in the novel whom she never meets but with whom she shares some of the same observations, commits suicide. Five years ago "Mrs. Dalloway" was adapted into a shallow, unsatisfying film starring Vanessa Redgrave. In accomplishing the virtually impossible feat of bringing to the screen that novel's introspective essence, the director and the screenwriter of "The Hours" have righted a wrong, albeit by proxy, through Mr. Cunningham's intuitive channeling. A central idea animating "Mrs. Dalloway" and embodied in its stream-of-consciousness language is that people who never meet, like Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, are connected by experiencing the same external events. "The Hours" extends that idea through the decades to celebrate the timelessness of great literature by placing the author, her fictional alter ego and two of her latter-day readers in the same sphere of consciousness. Interweaving flashbacks from Woolf's life as she was writing "Mrs. Dalloway" with scenes from the lives of Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a Southern California housewife and mother in 1951, and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a New York book editor living in contemporary Greenwich Village, their stories blend into a lofty, mystical theme and variations on Woolf's novel. Laura, who is depressed and agitated, is reading "Mrs. Dalloway" on the same day she is baking a birthday cake for her husband, Dan (John C. Reilly), a blunt, hale World War II veteran who dotes on her and barely notices her anguish. Observing and absorbing Laura's distress is her timid, fiercely clinging young son, Richie (Jack Rovello). While baking the cake, Laura receives a surprise visit from a brightly perky neighbor, Kitty (Toni Collette), who is about to go into the hospital to be tested for cancer and admits she's frightened. Meanwhile, in New York, Clarissa Vaughan (named after Woolf's character) is planning a celebration for her closest friend, Richard Brown (Ed Harris), a poet in the advanced stages of AIDS who has just won a prestigious award. As the movie folds these stories together, it emerges that Richard is Laura's grown-up son. And in a huge risk that pays off, the movie gives the dying poet a sudden flashback to the scared little boy he was (and fundamentally still is). Another bold surreal touch imagines Laura lying on a bed that's suddenly engulfed by the river that took Woolf. Clarissa and Richard were lovers when they were younger, but both eventually chose partners of the same sex. Richard had a long affair with Louis Waters (Jeff Daniels), now a college professor in San Francisco, who shows up for the celebration of the award. Clarissa has lived for years with a woman, Sally Lester (Allison Janney), and has a college-age daughter, Julia (Claire Danes), from an unknown sperm donor. Woolf herself was attracted to both men and women, and although her literary alter ego, Mrs. Dalloway, is married to a member of Parliament, on the day of the party her mind darts back to a kiss exchanged with another woman years earlier. In the movie, Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell (Miranda Richardson) visits from London with her family. And Woolf, in a moment of panic, plants a desperate, passionate kiss on Vanessa's mouth. In California, Laura Brown spontaneously reaches out to Kitty with a lingering kiss that is more than polite. Some of the movie's most wrenching moments show Leonard Woolf (Stephen Dillane) frantically reaching out to his troubled wife and being rebuffed. It's not that the Woolfs don't love each other, but the agony Virginia is enduring can't be touched by love or reason. These moments bring home the film's deepest and most intimidating insight about the essential aloneness of the individual and its feminist corollary: that appearances to the contrary, women in their deepest selves do not and should not define themselves in terms of men. Clarissa is the most grounded character, probably because she has been the truest to her instincts and has the most love to give back. When Richard, whose good days have dwindled to none, accuses Clarissa (whom he calls Mrs. Dalloway) of forcing him to stay alive, it's obviously true. Mr. Harris, more than matching his tumultuous performance in "Pollock," creates a wrenching, incendiary portrait of a man ravaged with illness, who thrashes with rage and bitterness, his emotions burning out of control like a torched oil slick on a contaminated lake. Ms. Streep's frayed, moody Clarissa is no hovering, haloed angel of mercy but an intensely self-aware, vulnerable urbanite worn down by her efforts to do the right thing. Through Ms. Streep's performance, the movie captures, like no film I can remember, the immediate, continuing interaction of experience and memory in the instinctive human drive to infuse the moment with meaning and value. Ms. Moore's Laura, although a reader, lacks Clarissa's or Richard's literary armament and is the more vulnerable for it. A wistful, frightened creature embarrassed by her own china-doll fragility, she longs to escape a life that feels all wrong but has little notion of where to go or what to do. Ms. Moore brings to the role the same luminous demureness that colors her portrayal of an innocent, well-meaning Connecticut housewife whose world shatters in "Far From Heaven." All these brooding, complicated people are prototypical Woolfian figures blessed and afflicted with the same feverish imaginations, perplexing ambiguities and brightly etched memories of their younger, more hopeful selves. Yet for all its sexual complexity, "The Hours" is not really about sex. The film, like the novel, is a sustained meditation on connection, human possibility, the elusive dream of happiness and the sometimes seductive call of death. Although suicide eventually tempts three of the film's characters, "The Hours" is not an unduly morbid film. Clear eyed and austerely balanced would be a more accurate description, along with magnificently written and acted. Mr. Glass's surging minimalist score, with its air of cosmic abstraction, serves as ideal connective tissue for a film that breaks down temporal barriers. Appropriately it is Woolf who has the definitive final word on the questions lurking in the backs of the minds of the film's characters with their flickering life forces. Leonard Woolf, querying his wife about her decision to kill off a character in "Mrs. Dalloway," asks her why. She answers carefully, "Someone has to die that the rest of us should value life more." |
Babyruth | Tuesday, February 25, 2003 - 05:50 pm     FYI, I posted the article rather than the link, because you have to subscribe online to access the article. |
Alegria | Wednesday, February 26, 2003 - 05:43 pm     That is a wonderful article. I was convinced by the end of the movie that the father of Clarissa's daughter was the Ed Harris character. The Hours is one of the best movies I have ever seen. It has provoked controversy among Virginia Woolf fans who think it is too one sided in the portrayal of her. Viewed on its own there is much to think about and wonder about. My friend and I are still talking about it. The actors were all wonderful. Most people would probably disagree with me but I thought Meryl Streep was the weakest character and was just being herself. It did not seem like a powerful performance. Ed Harris was heartbreaking and Nicole Kidman was riveting. |
Juju2bigdog | Wednesday, February 26, 2003 - 09:12 pm     Thanks for the article, Babyruth. It is an excellent distillation of the movie. After I posted what I did above, I went and read as many reviews as I could find, none with the depth of the one Babyruth posted above. I came to the conclusion it would be a great help to know more about Virginia Woolf before seeing the movie, and perhaps even more helpful to have read Mrs. Dalloway. |
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