There’s a lot going on in “The Hours” that summarizing is unable to capture. One could argue that the single story running through these three lives is that each woman is suffocating. In the course of this day, they all reach three decisions on what to do, decisions that are in some ways the same and in others wildly different. As morbid as the stories in “The Hours” are, we do see a hopeful progression for the lot of women in our culture. Woolf is surrounded by family, doctors, and servants that all think they know what’s best for her, and are unwilling to listen to her. Her final solution is suicide. Moore’s husband means well and is always willing to ask how she’s feeling, but she is too terrified to upset the role of a housewife to disrupt his happiness. She is never willing to confide in him and thus we can never know what his reaction would be. (As a veteran of the war in the South Pacific, John C. Reilly is essentially playing the same character he played in “The Thin Red Line,” here named Brown instead of Storm.) Escape is her choice, as she leaves her son with a neighbor so she can flee to a local motel for an afternoon alone with “Mrs. Dalloway.” As for Streep, she covers up her own suffocation by helping others, but Harris catches onto her ruse, and seeks to free her of him so that she may confront her very own life for real. “The Hours” ends hopefully because she is willing to take his advice and face life as it is, even if he has to go to an extreme length to make his point.
Another interpretation is that the three women, as well as being one-and-the-same, are different incarnations in the artistic process: Woolf is the artist, Clarissa (both Streep and Mrs. Dalloway) is the artistic creation, and Moore is the reader. Like “Thirteen Conversations About One Thing” from earlier this year, the impact of each story is somehow incomplete without the others. In the same way, the lives of each of the women are somehow incomplete without the others, which suggests that our own lives are empty without someone to hear us (a reader), someone to inform us with her own experiences (an artist), or the knowledge that our lives are worthwhile on their own terms (the work of art). A full life, “The Hours” suggests, is one in which we are all observer, observed, and artist.
“The Hours” has many fine performances in the soliloquy style, full of tics, gestures, mannerisms, and heavy make-up. Nicole Kidman wears a prosthetic nose and frumpy clothes, and we see how blotchy and boney her hands are; these steps are taken not so much to make her look more like Woolf but to un-glamorize her, which is a daring step for a prestige picture. As the dying poet Ed Harris is like a single giant scab, and a young character from one segment pops up looking like a well-preserved corpse in a later segment. Given that each of the leading ladies has only about thirty or forty minutes a piece to get her story across, and that many of the supporting characters have only a scene or two, it is credit to them and screenwriter David Hare that we so quickly get a sense of who everyone is.
When I first saw the trailer for “The Hours,” I had to laugh. I laughed not because I thought the trailer was funny or the movie looked stupid, but because I had read the book by Michael Cunningham on which it is based, and the trailer’s histrionics and melodrama are anathema to the novel’s pensive stillness. Adapting “The Hours” for the big screen runs into two difficulties. The book’s suicide, homosexuality, multiple storylines, and insanity can be put to film just fine. The problem facing director Stephan Daldry (“Billy Elliot”) and screenwriter Hare is how much of the novel takes place not just internally, but with the domestic concerns of women. Getting an audience to understand and worry about when the bomb is going to blow up or if Our Hero can reload fast enough is easy; getting the same empathy over Meryl Streep freaking out over the perfect party or Julianne Moore getting a cake right is a little tougher.
Equally daunting for the filmmakers is how most of the emotions felt during the novel “The Hours” are not brought on by activity, but by inactivity, by feeling the weight of life during moments of inertness. One scene in both the book and movie includes the poet telling his old lover that she is “throwing parties to cover the silence.” The title “The Hours,” I suspect, refers to all those moments, one after another, in which nameless dread—regret, mortality, lost opportunities, whatever—creeps into our minds.
Inactivity and the internal lives of women are not what the cinema is famous for portraying. Director Daldry plays “The Hours” conservatively and more-or-less abandons the novel’s tone of stillness, of the weight of time; we get the novel’s dialogue about the weight of time, but not the feel. Daldry uses relatively quick cuts, camera movements, and has employed an enjoyable but hyperactive score by Philip Glass to punch up our emotions. Moments that are not in and of themselves very important, but only matter in their countless repetition through the hours, weeks, and years, come across as being so serious and so dire. As Moore leaves her home and son for an afternoon by herself she drives like hell, through the squealing tires and fast cutting of a car chase, but somehow I get the feeling her trip through the antiseptic, spread-out suburbs of the 1950s would seem slower. Maybe a movie angled for a spring release wouldn’t have felt the obligation of adding a car chase.
Finished January 26, 2003
Copyright © 2003 Friday & Saturday Night