The Hours: Movie & DVD Review (2002)

8/28/2007 Posted by Admin

Becoming Virginia Woolf

(Originally published Dec. 27, 2002)

In "The Hours," Stephen Daldry's moving adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Nicole Kidman--barely recognizable beneath a prosthetic nose that has received almost as much attention as her remarkable performance--becomes Virginia Woolf, a woman whose bouts with depression drove her to take her own life in 1941, when she wrote a suicide note to her husband Leonard (Stephen Dillane), placed a stone in her coat pocket and used the River Ouse to float away.

The movie, which was nominated Tuesday for nine Academy Awards and which Daldry ("Billy Elliott") based on David Hare's script, begins with Woolf's suicide and then fades to black, shattering any formal structure to take audiences on a journey back and forward through time that will last the rest of the film.

Indeed, just as in Woolf's 1925 novel, "Mrs. Dalloway," on which all of this is loosely based, Daldry fragments time, drawing us into stories busily unfolding in 1951 and 2001, while also spiraling back to the days, months and years preceding Woolf's death.

It's the sort of movie that, in the wrong hands, could have become a conceptual nightmare, a film whose soul might have been lost in the stitching together of its many parts.

But that's not the case. Bound by Philip Glass' fluid, dreamlike score and Peter Boyle's superb editing, the three stories are seamlessly interwoven with such skill and care, "The Hours" isn't just noteworthy for its acting and storytelling, but also for its craft.

In the film, Julianne Moore is Laura Brown, a pregnant, suicidal housewife in 1951 Los Angeles who has discovered in Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway" the truth of her own life, which she feels she has wasted in spite of a son (Jack Rovello) and husband (John C. Reilly) who adore her.

Seeking a way out so she's no longer the burden she feels she is to her family--as Woolf did--she tucks a bottle of pills into her purse, leaves her son with a babysitter and rents a motel room. There, she'll finish "Mrs. Dalloway" and perhaps, at the end of the day and in a room of her own, even her own life.

In 2001, Meryl Streep's Clarissa Vaughn, a successful editor, has decided to throw a party for her best friend and former lover Richard (Ed Harris), a famous poet battling AIDS who is beginning to question for whom he's living--himself or Clarissa, a woman he affectionately calls Mrs. Dalloway.

Like Woolf's Septimus, Richard also is contemplating suicide, something Clarissa senses but which she cannot face. Instead, she immerses herself in all of the meaningless minutia of Richard's party and states rather grandly to her lesbian partner, Sally (Allison Janey), that she thinks she'll buy the flowers for the party herself.

It's a throwaway comment that recalls "Dalloway's" famous opening line and you can't help thinking: 80 years of women's lib has allowed this modern Clarissa to be free with her sexuality and to enjoy a career once dominated by men, but she's still saddled with the role of a caretaker.

Sexuality weighs heavily on "The Hours," just as it did in Woolf's own life and work, and it's used as a cornerstone on which so much hinges. To be sure, love has cost everyone here deeply and the price, in the end, proves steep.

As strong as all of the performances are, Kidman, the standout, has never been better. She immerses herself so completely into her character that you sense, simply by the way she carries herself--her back slightly hunched, shoulders rounded, head tilted down, as if to shield herself from the world--that facing each day is too much for her, just as it was for Woolf.

With Kidman, Moore and Harris all scoring Academy Award nominations (Streep was overlooked, but she was nominated for her performance in "Adaptation"), "The Hours" ends with a satisfying twist that blurs the decades together and crushes time in a cathartic rush. The surprise won't be revealed here, but if this movie is about how some choose not to live, it's also just as much about why others choose to go on.

Grade: A