The Hours--A Review--2002 Movie

A cursory reading of several online reviews of this 2002 film, directed by Stephen Daldry, might make you wonder if the critics had seen the same movie. So controversial has Woolf become since her "rediscovery" by the feminist movement in the 1970s that many critics cannot see this film except through the lens of that feminist reconstruction. And, indeed, there are indications in the movie, based on Michael Cunningham's 1998 novel The Hours, that some of the issues in the "contemporary debate" over Woolf influenced the work. For example, Daldry has all of the leading female characters engage in acts of lip kissing other females--whether or not the characters are portrayed as lesbians. Again, Daldry presents the difficult issue of whether Virginia's husband Stephen actually hindered her work by taking her out of London society to the sanitized suburban setting of Richmond, a half hour's train ride from London, supposedly for her own protection.

But once you lay those issues to one side, and begin to see the structure of the film, you see its potential, as well as its unclarity. In this review I will describe some of the "action" of the film, focusing especially on the poignant lines and condition of Richard Brown (played by Ed Harris), the AIDS-stricken award-winning poet friend of Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep).

The Premise of the Film

The Hours is a story of literary life that gets reflected in the life of three generations of women who connect somehow with the literary work, Mrs Dalloway (1925), that is the centerpiece of the movie. Generation one is that of Virginia Woolf, who struggles mightily with a severe mental affliction (probably bipolar disorder, though the only "pole" portrayed in the movie is the depressive one) while she formulates the major idea and the direction of her book. Though the movie is supposed to be about "one day in the life" of three characters (since Mrs. Dalloway is about one such day in the life of a character who is preparing to give a party), Virginia's life is seemingly drawn out to much more than a day. The characters in her emerging novel weigh on her mind at least as much as the realities of her physical existence. She realizes that she must "kill off" one of her lead characters in the novel, though it will not be Mrs. Dalloway herself. When asked why she must do so, it is because a death impresses on the others a sense of the value/importance of life.

Nicole Kidman's portrait of the wan, dyspeptic, unengaged, distant and creative Woolf won her an Academy Award for Best Actress. She made Woolf into a haunting and almost wraith-like figure who saw her life as a debilitating imprisonment, with her husband Leonard as her jailor.

Generation two is set in Los Angeles in 1951. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is a pregnant wife and mother of a young son but is so lacking in confidence and focus that she is unable to make a good birthday cake for her husband on his birthday. We don't have a clue as to the reason for her downward spiral, but through her conversation with a neighbor lady who is going in for exploratory surgery, we get the sense that Laura is oppressed by the expectations placed upon her in the "perfect" environment of the 1950s. Her clueless "war veteran" husband, played by John C. Reilly, is perhaps a little too stereotyped, but his ignorance of her feelings and struggles perhaps subtly contributes to her sense of wispish living. She reads the book Mrs. Dalloway and decides that she must commit suicide. So, she rents a room in an expensive LA hotel with her pills and Mrs. Dalloway surrounding her. She is unable to go through with her suicide (indeed, Mrs. Dalloway didn't die in the book), though we subsequently learn that she left her family shortly after the birth of her second child.

The "third generation" of the film takes place in NYC in 2001. Clarissa Vaughn (Clarissa is Mrs. Dalloway's first name), is, like Laura Brown, going to throw a party but instead of one or two people being the "guests," she will have 60. The party is to celebrate a significant poetry prize won by Richard Brown (whom we later discover is the grown-up son of the 1951 Laura Brown). Richard is gay and dying of AIDS, but Clarissa (who "discovered" her lesbianism sometime after bearing a daughter) loves him and has been centering a lot of her life around him for years. He makes her feel alive when in his presence; outside of his presence all her life is mundane and rather trivial. Rather than Laura Brown, who reads about and wants to imitate Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa Vaughn is Mrs. Dalloway. For, as with the story of Mrs. Dalloway, we follow Clarissa only through one day of her life as she is planning a party. Her "war-wounded" friend (there was also one in Mrs. Dalloway) is Richard who, like Mrs. Dalloway's friend, commits suicide just before the party begins. Thus, the interesting premise of the film is that art, which was first written in 1923, takes on a life of its own through a reader in 1951, but it really becomes instantiated through an incarnation in 2001. Rarely has a book and an act of reading become such a focus of a film.

One Note--On Richard

We first met Richard Brown as little Ritchie Brown in the dysfunctional LA family in 1951. But when we see him as a man in full, in 2001, we see the almost lyrical quality of his speech. It doesn't soar high to the rafters; it explores, rather, some of the depths of anguish, loss, and failure. And that is the note on which I would like to close today. When discussing his receipt of the poetry prize with Clarissa, he breaks into a plaintive little speech. He is, he feels, a failure, because he wasn't able in his work even to describe the wonder and full life of just one day. The implication is that since he is unable really to capture the day, the basic unit of living, his poetic work has fallen short even of the most basic challenge. If you cannot describe the day, getting into all of its activities and news, with insight, accuracy, succinctness and lyricism, what are you other than a failure?

There is a sense in this movie that life is lived not in the span of three score years and 10 or a generation or even a year, but in a day. It is the response to the day that summarizes the response you have to life. It was Laura Brown's day that led her to reject suicide but, in fact, to plan her "escape" from her family. It was Virginia Woolf's "day" (though this is presented more hazily in the movie) which led her to define/redefine the direction of her book; it is Clarissa Vaughn's day that brought her face to face with Richard, his death, her party, her past. Richard, though winning the most prestigious poetry prize around, couldn't describe the day. Are we up for it?

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