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To call "The Hours" a highly pedigreed movie would be an understatement. Boasting not one but three of Hollywood's most respected actresses, as well as director Stephen Daldry, fresh from the triumph of his critically acclaimed "Billy Elliot," the film also features a screenplay by playwright David Hare, and music by none other than Philip Glass. It's based on Michael Cunningham's 18 PEN/Faulkner award-winning novel of the same name, and its subject matter ranging from literary leviathan Virginia Woolf, to postwar suburban angst, to a modern-day poet dying of AIDS could not possibly be weightier. The question is does "The Hours" live up to its blue-blooded promise?
The answer, happily, is yes. Daldry and producer Scott Rudin have crafted a fine, luminous film about the search by three women, in varying circumstances and times, for meaning in a life lived on its own terms, whatever those terms may be. Though not without its flaws, "The Hours" is a pleasure to watch as it unfolds its gorgeous triptych of settings across the screen. Generally I found it inferior to Cunningham's novel, which is no surprise since I doubt his intense scrutiny of his characters' inner lives could ever be adequately conveyed through dialogue alone. Still, it is an impressive achievement, and solidly deserves its Best Drama Golden Globe.
"The Hours" is adapted from a book that was in turn inspired by another book Woolf's seminal "Mrs. Dalloway," whose original working title was also "The Hours." "'Mrs. Dalloway,'" writes Cunningham on the film's web site, "is the story of one day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a 5-year-old upper-class Englishwoman married to a man named Richard, who is a pleasant and unremarkable fellow with a middling job in Parliament. On the day the story takes place, Clarissa is giving a party, the kind of party aristocratic London hostesses gave frequently during the social season elaborate, expensive, and stuffy."
However, her routine preoccupations become shrouded by vague disquiet after a visit from Peter Walsh, an admirer from her youth. Peter has failed to achieve success by conventional standards, but expresses that Clarissa's life is even more trivial, leading her to wonder if her existence is meaningless. Though Clarissa's uncertainty is never fully resolved, and she goes on living more or less as before, Woolf provides her with a negative double in the figure of insane war veteran Septimus Warren Smith, whose day deteriorates as Clarissa's progresses towards the triumph of her party. His reality, populated by imaginary voices and birds singing in ancient Greek, is shadowed by an awareness of his every action's futility. At last, threatened by institutionalization, he throws himself out a window.
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Given that Woolf, too, took her own life, and that "Mrs. Dalloway" marked the start of the most productive period in her writing a period facilitated by a move to London from the nearby suburb of Richmond, despite the city's threat to her already precarious mental health it is hard not to see the opposition of Clarissa, the survivor, and Septimus, the victim of chaos, as a question Woolf posed to herself at a critical time in her life. Cunningham sees it, and, after opening "The Hours" with the scene of Woolf's 141 suicide, travels back to the fictional day in 1 in which she both begins to write "Mrs. Dalloway" and convinces her protective husband Leonard to move back to London. The second portion of "The Hours," which moves between its stories in alternating chapters, is set in 14 to tell the story of pregnant Los Angeles housewife Laura Brown, preparing with her son to celebrate her husband's birthday but beset by a growing uneasiness as she reads "Mrs. Dalloway." Its third, contemporary part updates the novel's story itself, as New Yorker Clarissa Vaughan attempts to honor her old lover Richard, a poet stricken with AIDS, by throwing him what else? a party.
Though structurally complicated, "The Hours" contains enough parallels between its characters' lives to afford what screenwriter Hare calls the "deep pleasures of recognition" in picking them out of Cunningham's radiant, swiftly flowing prose. Its fluid style is a more enjoyable read than "Mrs. Dalloway" itself, which by contrast feels sluggish and drained of vitality. Perhaps it's the emotional immediacy conferred by an American writer on his characters that makes Woolf's
seem so proper, so
depressed, so ... English. But Cunningham's brief yet focused chapters also escape the rambling to which "Mrs. Dalloway" is prone, and provides a satisfying closure that the original, caught in the tangles of its stream-of-consciousness narrative, never achieves. More skillful with his fragments than Woolf is with her whole, he both daringly updates her tale (his Clarissa is a book editor, living in a contented lesbian union) and recombines the traits of her characters in ways that surpass her design for example, by making the "mad poet" Septimus and Clarissa's ex-lover one and the same, thereby bringing his heroine into a direct conflict with meaning that is ultimately more shattering.
"The Hours" on film is inevitably less compelling than "The Hours" in print, though it does have advantages over the book in its artful appeal to the senses, most notably through Glass' score. Floating through the lush, expressive soundscapes anchored by his arrangements of crystalline piano, deep warm cello and unearthly violin is bliss on its own, and worth the price of admission. The viewer's eyes also sink gratefully into cinematographer Seamus McGarvey's luxuriously soft focus, which lends a glowing tone to the shades of blue, rust and beige that dominate in the separate stories but also fade together, emphasizing their unity.
Where the film falters somewhat is in its dialogue, specifically during the New York scenes, where the efforts at exposition are all too transparent. Hare's commitment to minimizing voice-overs is admirable, but also shortchanges some of Cunningham's best passages by turning private thoughts into public exchanges that come off sounding flat and melodramatic. One of the difficulties in translating from page to screen is that it removes our access to the characters' inner lives, necessarily consigning us to a more superficial view. Since the film has three heroines and only two hours to explore them, it treats much of their background topically, at the risk of encouraging shallow acting.
Sadly, this is the case with film veteran Meryl Streep, who gives a weak showing, often seeming not quite present in her role as Clarissa Vaughan. She responds subtly and believably in her mother-daughter interactions with Claire Danes, but something in particular is missing in her scene with Jeff Daniels, who plays Richard's ex-lover. The actors, instead of connecting, often seem to be speaking past each other, and when Streep bursts into tears, she seems less like a woman whose life is being rocked to its foundations than one having a menopausal breakdown. At best, Clarissa's existential worries come off as a kind of irritable insincerity opposite Richard (Ed Harris, looking appropriately ravaged and vacant-eyed, who does what he can to forge a truer pathos out of his stagey dialogue, without entirely succeeding).
For her part, Oscar nominee Julianne Moore offers a middling performance as homemaker Laura Brown. In a role originally earmarked for the more gamine Gwyneth Paltrow, Moore's motherly allure highlights the irony of her character a lost soul of a woman who loves her young son but has little "maternal instinct" for him or her unborn child. It is safe to say Moore does better than Paltrow would have here, but she still starts off shakily opposite John C. Reilly as Laura's husband, Dan. She does, however, improve as the film goes on, and is at her best beneath the wrinkled patina of old-age makeup that camouflages her at the movie's end.
Cosmetics create another remarkable metamorphosis in the person of Nicole Kidman. Outsizing her nose may not make Kidman look more like Virginia Woolf, but it does help her disappear into the role, for which Kidman's preparations (which included reading all of Woolf's letters and living alone in a remote cottage) pay off handsomely. Hitherto the least seriously regarded of the three actresses, the siren of "Moulin Rouge," unrecognizable in a baggy drop-waisted dress, puts Streep and Moore to shame with her incandescent portrayal of Woolf. Throughout the film, whose final moments are all hers, her eyes radiate the fierce will and intelligence of a woman determined to both live her life and pursue her art, knowing that to try to do both may cost her sanity.
Kidman's performance is a fitting tribute both to the author of "Mrs. Dalloway" and to the writer who has fictionalized her. She conveys the ultimate purpose of the book, which is to explore those rare moments of painful beauty and haunting joy that define us the rapturous energy that comes surging up through heartache, disappointment and the sordid distractions of everyday life. "We live our lives, do whatever we do, and then we sleep it's as simple and ordinary as that," reflects Cunningham's Clarissa at her tale's end. "There's just this for consolation an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything we've ever imagined, though everyone ... knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more."
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