I was decidedly upset when I first heard Michael Cunningham’s The Hours would be made into a Hollywood feature film. The first television trailer only made my agony worse: “Three women, each living a lie.…” If there’s anything more distasteful than personal revelation, it must be the sort of superficial revelation so dear to “Chicken Soup For the Soul” stories and Hollywood “art films.”
Regardless, my penchant for Virginia Woolf and, to an even greater extent, Philip Glass, who scored the film, prodded me into the world of big-budget Hollywood disasters.
The Hours follows brief periods in the lives of three women (each, apparently, living her own special lie) through three plotlines that retrospectively intersect (ostensibly).
The first features Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf before her suicide in 1941 and during the writing of Mrs. Dalloway in 1923. The second plotline follows Laura Brown, a depressed 1950s housewife, played by Julianne Moore, who—and you may have difficulty grasping the brilliance of this thematic symmetry—is reading Mrs. Dalloway. The final plotline follows Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep), an editor preparing a party (more shades of Mrs. Dalloway) for her dying friend Richard (Ed Harris) while suffering through her own painfully slow breakdown.
I’ll admit the actors turn in some of the finest performances of their careers, but it’s a distinction on par with that belonging to the world’s finest loaf of Wonder Bread. The characters are the sort of melancholics I’m sure real melancholy women hate and happy housewives take as affirmation of “how good they have it.”
Virginia Woolf is presented in an especially shallow light: the tortured female artist with a history of suicide attempts and psychosis. Even worse, she speaks the way she writes, rhyming off motivational poster slogans suited only to depressed needle junkies. Julianne Moore’s self-medicating housewife is similarly assembly-line manufactured; I would be hard-pressed to believe eights weeks of her preparation weren’t spent reading Adbusters and taking Prozac. But my favourite character is played by Meryl Streep—the poor thing—who cries so well on cue and presents a character so happy on the surface, but so tortured on the inside. Magnifico!
Very simply, the end result is neither particularly poignant, which it tries to be, nor incredibly well structured, which it could have been. The explicit imagery (flowers, eggs, etc.) is a lazy way to create symmetry between the three plots, but the largest threat to the film’s cohesion is the explication of the plots’ interconnectedness. In screenwriter David Hare’s desire to weld the three stories together, he’s failed to hold back enough to sustain an audience’s interest. When the stories finally meld, we can only respond with a resounding “so what?”
As for the Glass score, my last hope? It was mostly older material, rerecorded with a slight change in instrumentation that ended up too loud and recycled in the final sound edit.
The Hours is just too clichéd. It’s worth seeing, but only if you bear these facts in mind: 1) You will not be surprised at the end, 2) the film will not provide you with any personal revelations, and 3) Nicole Kidman’s portrayal of Virginia Woolf is not nearly as deep as her Oscar dress will be sheer.
