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Film 'The Hours' seems like minutes
[Photo: Paramount Pictures/Miramax Films]
Julianne Moore is a 1950s housewife and mother whose life is not fulfilling in The Hours. |
By MARGO HAMMOND, Times Books Editor
© St. Petersburg Times
published January 16, 2003
In this impressive adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a tight screenplay and superb acting make for a compelling movie.
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Great movie adaptations of highly literary works have been rare. In movies, something has to happen and that something has to be visible to the audience. Films are not called moving pictures for nothing. But in great literature much of what happens, happens unseen, within the minds of the characters. Such interior drama has always been a challenge to bring to the screen. Just think of how unsuccessful most movies based on Henry James' works have been.
That's what makes The Hours so praiseworthy. Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham, an homage to English writer Virginia Woolf and the stream-of-consciousness style of her 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway, the film is a virtual holograph of interior dialogue. Intertwining the stories of three women in three places and time, the film -- as the novel -- gives us the chance to peer into the souls of each character and vicariously into our own as well.
How is it done? Credit the taut screenplay by David Hare where every word counts. To make visible the invisible torments within his three characters, Hare rarely resorts to voiceovers, the lazy screenwriter's way to convey thoughts. Rather, he employs the very method Woolf herself used: an obsessive attention to details. Not only every word, but every action -- whether it is a trip to buy flowers for a party, the disposal of a dying bird, the baking of a cake or a kiss -- speaks volumes.
Credit also superb acting by Nicole Kidman as the anguished Virginia Woolf, Julianne Moore as the suffocated Laura Brown and Meryl Streep as the flustered Clarissa Vaughan.
The stories of these women are linked, superficially by the details of their lives and profoundly by their shared human condition. In the first story, Woolf is struggling to write her novel Mrs. Dalloway, the day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a woman who fills her life with parties and activities to stem the rising dread within herself. In the second story, set in California in the 1950s, Laura Brown is reading that novel -- and identifying with that dread as she desperately tries to live a life that doesn't fit her. And in the third story the central character is Mrs. Dalloway -- or at least the modern-day version of Woolf's character.
The film begins and ends with an image of Virginia Woolf placing stones in her pocket and drowning herself in the river near her country home in Sussex in 1941, but the movie, like Cunningham's novel, is not about death but life. "You cannot find peace by avoiding life," Virginia tells her husband Leonard in Hare's script. In Cunningham's novel, Woolf also chooses life -- at least for her character, Mrs. Dalloway. Originally planning to have her commit suicide, she changes her mind:
"Clarissa will be bereaved, deeply lonely, but she will not die," Cunningham quotes Woolf as thinking. "She will be too much in love with life . . . Clarissa, sane Clarissa -- exultant, ordinary Clarissa -- will go on . . . loving her life of ordinary pleasures."
Someone does die -- both in Mrs. Dalloway and in The Hours -- but even in that choice, life trumps death. "Someone has to die," Woolf explains, "so the rest of us will value life more in contrast."
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