*** (out of ****)
Starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Ed Harris, Jeff Daniels, Alison Jenney, John C. Reilly, Claire Danes, Stephen Dillane, Toni Collette, and Miranda Richardson
Directed by Stephen Daldry & written for the screen by David Hare, from the novel by Michael Cunningham, with excerpts from the writings of Virginia Woolf
2002 PG13
Ah, the three-day weekend. The time when people who don’t go to see movies go to see movies and can’t operate the automated ticket dispenser. It’s like seeing all those strange faces in church on Christmas and Easter.
If it’s MLK day 2003, that means it’s the end of 2002 movie year. A certain kind of movie comes out at the end of the year; Hollywood calls them “prestige pictures,” i.e., the big contenders for the major awards, like the Oscars and the Golden Globes. These movies aren’t just serious and important—there were plenty of those last spring—these movies are So Serious and So Important. Like players in a musical, always ready to burst into song, people in these films, like “The Hours” are ready to launch into resplendent, flowery soliloquies at the drop of a hat, mostly delivered within the close-ups and medium shots used as clips for the Oscar telecast. People don’t so much have conversations as make speeches toward one another.
Last year “A Beautiful Mind” was the big prestige picture, and it was good enough despite being So Serious and So Important. “The Hours,” winner of this year’s Golden Globe for Best Drama and a heavy-hitter for the big Oscar, is also such a movie. It features good production values, solid directing, a very literary script, and many fine performances in the soliloquy style. Cynics will say it was constructed with no other intent besides sweeping up prizes. Who can say, but “The Hours” does break the typical mainstream mold for prestige movies by featuring women instead of men in almost all the prominent roles. It also uses an unconventional structure that shifts back-and-forth in time among three seemingly unrelated lives, in order to show, among other things, the power of good literature.
“The Hours” is a day in the lives of three different women in three different eras. The stories are not really connected in any literal sense, only thematically, and watching them we come to realize that we’re seeing the same story played out in three different circumstances with different results. The first of the women is the great British author Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), whom we meet on the morning of her suicide in the 1940s. We promptly back up to the 1920s when she’s lost her marbles and her husband has taken her to live in the country, where she spends a day trying to begin her novel “Mrs. Dalloway,” and is paid a visit by her sister (Miranda Richardson). It’s important to note that “Mrs. Dalloway” tells the story of a woman content on the outside but trapped on the inside, throwing parties and smiling just to hide her desperation.
In the 1950s we meet a housewife named Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), alone for yet another day among many with her toddler son, while her husband (John C. Reilly) goes to work. Today is her husband’s birthday and he couldn’t be happier with his safe, suburban life. She, however, is completely, inarticulately stifled, and can’t stand being with her son, not because she doesn’t love him, but because she has no idea how to behave around him. She finds escape in Woolf’s novel “Mrs. Dalloway.” Mrs. Dalloway’s first name, incidentally, is Clarissa.
Lastly we meet an editor named Clarissa (Meryl Streep) in 2001, planning a party for a dying former lover (Ed Harris) who has just won an award for poetry. The editor has a female lover (Alison Jenney) of her own, but their relationship doesn’t amount to much. The dying poet openly confronts her with the idea that he’s staying alive just for her, and that she lives without thought for herself, only looking after others—her daughter, ex-lover, current lover—in co-dependent desperation. Streep is in many ways similar to Woolf’s fictitious Mrs. Dalloway, so much so that Harris has given her the title as a nickname. Her contentment, smiles, and politeness while busying herself with domestic activities are, like Mrs. Dalloway, a veneer for her desperation. These three tales are told not in chronological order, but intercut, as if they are happening concurrently.