The Hours
Cooper, Rand Richards
Rand Richards Cooper TRIPLE PLAY 'The Hours' I belatedly went to see The Hours, the Virginia Woolf biopic that figures to dom-inate Oscar night with its trifecta of female stars. The Hours is...
...Dalloway does not know, but who suffers a similar deep disaffection...
...For all their obvious dissimilarities in style and scope, the two films offer a transatlantic take on a shared subject, namely, the agonized emergence of the modern: ethnicity and the modern city on the one hand, psychology and the modern sensibility on the other...
...Always to look life in the face- and to know it...
...Always giving parties to cover the silence...
...These are characters united not by acquaintance, but by psychological affinity and spiritual predica-ment...
...The trick mirrors how the film replaces time with theme, uniting the women in a commonality of ideas-suicide as courage...
...The Hours is artfully edited (at times almost too artfully), so that the arrangement of flowers in a vase, or someone answering a door, swings us from England in 1923, to Southern California in 1951, to Manhattan half a century later...
...Dalloway...
...Dalloway," he muses as Streep bustles about his cluttered apartment, trying to help him get ready...
...Behind the ballyhooed prosthetic nose that makes her almost unrecognizable, Kidman plays Woolf with a vulnerability so heavily armored by intelligence as to be belligerent...
...It's all irony and undertone and dreadful implication, reflecting the modernist challenge of capturing consciousness-"everything contained in a moment," as one character says...
...This is one movie you'd love to hear being pitched to the studio execs...
...And like a Scorsese film, The Hours favors character over plot, its intense inwardness creating a feast for its actors...
...The film is thus an adaptation of a novel's meditation on another novel's rumination on suicide...
...The Hours bears interesting relation to another of this year's Oscar contenders for Best Picture, Gangs of New York, Martin Scorsese's saga of Irish street violence in nineteenth-century Lower Manhattan...
...the near-impossibility of happiness...
...sexual ambiguity...
...Yet screenwriter Hare and director Stephen Daldry (whose last effort was a lovely film about childhood and the artistic temperament, Billy Elliot) somehow make this potentially precious material work...
...With its daunting leaps in time and place, Cunningham's novel presents a formidable challenge for a filmmaker, but David Hare's screenplay is audaciously faithful, giving us far-flung characters joined by thematic and circumstantial threads...
...Appropriately, there's no way to sum up this film without recourse to the gloomy and grandiose terminology of modernism: existential despair...
...Ah, Mrs...
...These performances are superb, but as Clarissa, Meryl Streep outdoes them...
...the pregnant Laura, jarred by a neighbor's revelation of cancer into an awareness of her own profound unhappiness...
...Her struggles convey an agonized introspection that the film- written and made by men-offers as Woolf's example of feminism, her challenging legacy to all women who would live honestly.e honestly...
...I seem to be unraveling," Clarissa observes, weeping in her kitchen for reasons she doesn't quite understand...
...Richard, given to baleful truth-telling, offers a take on Clarissa that sums up the original novel's relevance...
...Their brushes with mortality precipitate both of the latter women into a deep unease that verges on panic...
...Though he's onscreen less often than the women, the character of Richard emerges as central, not only because he figures in a surprise twist, but because we sense that his looming death was what made novelist Cunningham turn to Woolf in the first place...
...alienation...
...by lost youth and lost love...
...All three women face defining life crises: Woolf, a semi-captive at a country estate where she is being kept by her husband, Leonard, after a series of breakdowns and suicide attempts...
...Like a modern novel, the movie offers little action...
...To love it for what it is, and then-to put it away...
...This is a profoundly literary film, not only in its themes, but in the metaphysics of its structure, which establishes reading as a place where kindred souls (writer and readers) coexist, defying time and death...
...The Hours is based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title, itself an homage to Woolf and her 1925 novel, Mrs...
...and by the ever-present option of suicide...
...and Clarissa, organizing a party to honor a dear friend and former lover, Richard (Ed Harris), a poet dying of aids...
...Woolf's novel took a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, an English matron hosting a party amid an inner turmoil of unhappiness, and tied it to the simultaneous suicide of another character, the poet Septimus Smith, whom Mrs...
...Sound complicated...
...One proviso: to appreciate The Hours, you've got to enjoy being bathed in mortality...
...the burden of consciousness...
...by the passage of time...
...Moore, pale and wan, reprises her Far from Heaven conventional-housewife role, but adds an undercurrent of unar-ticulated, frantic misery...
...Dalloway with pivotal days in the much later lives of two of her readers: Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a housewife in 1950s Southern California, and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a book editor in Greenwich Village in 2001...
...To look life in the face," Kidman reads in a voice-over from Woolf's suicide note to her husband...
...The Hours is haunted by the insistent loneliness of Philip Glass's minimalist score...
...The movie, like Cunningham's novel, takes this conceit and runs with it, intercutting a day in the life of Woolf (Nicole Kidman) during the writing of Mrs...
...the ultimate reality of alone-ness-suggested by Woolf's life and death and art...
...Streep has always been a chameleonic actress, and here she takes her character into a zone of such intense emotional fluctuation that her face seems to show six emotions at once...
Vol. 130 • March 2003 • No. 5
