|   What
do a novelist, a homemaker, and a poet have in common?
The Hours, directed by Stephen
Daldry, poses the question and gives an implicit answer--sensory
overload leading to clinical depression. The novelist
is Virginia Woolf (played by Nicole Kidman), the homemaker
is Laura Brown (played by Marianne Moore), and the poet
is the latter's son Richard (played by Ed Harris). In
1941 Woolf finally committed suicide after several earlier
attempts. In 1951 Laura got on a bus, bound for Canada,
abandoning her husband Dan (played by John C. Reilly)
and two children in Los Angeles. In 2001 Richard Brown
jumped to his death from a New York apartment, unable
to live in a weakened condition as a victim of Karposi's
sarcoma, a common terminal skin cancer found among HIV-infected
men, under the eyes of the woman who is the heroine
of his novel, Clarissa Vaughn (played by Meryl Streep),
who was his teenage sweetheart before he learned that
he was gay. In all three cases, the pain of enduring
"the hours" in their lives exceeds what they
can handle, so they find a way out of their misery.
The reliance of their partners on flowers as a way to
brighten the physical environments of the three depressed
characters demonstrates how little most people know
about how to live with someone whose depression is based
in part on a sense of failure in living up to expectations,
both those of others and of oneself. The 1951 and 2001
events are linked when Laura shows up at Clarissa's
apartment, presumably to attend Richard's memorial service
and to explain why she inflicted trauma on him by leaving
the family for Toronto, but there are other connections.
Even if a filmviewer has not read the Pulitzer-prizewinning
novel of the same title by Michael Cunningham, on which
the film is based, the cerebral nature of the dialog
of the film cannot possibly do justice to the ambition
of the story. Music by Philip Glass is a poor substitute
by trying to fill in the pauses with a sense of the
agony; the monotonous reverie, reminiscent of parts
of his filmscore for Kundun
(1997), may actually put an audience to sleep. The most
profound quote in the film, Clarissa's statement that
people "stay alive for each other," a restatement
of the actuarial fact that couples live longer than
single persons, is questioned by all three cases, in
which the psychological burden of togetherness is excessive.
Similar to the case of Virginia Woolf, Richard wishes
to unburden Clarissa through his death, as Clarissa
has been attending daily to Richard in his invalid state.
But Clarissa has a loving partner, Sally Lester (played
by Allison Janney), whom she kisses at the end of the
film, so her devotion to Richard comes across as that
of a "fag hag" who just wants to be the one
woman in his life who does not abandon him. The hint
of Virginia Woolf's bisexuality, moreover, will escape
the attention of most filmviewers, since her husband
so dutifully takes care of her. What ties the three
stories together is the character of Mrs. Dalloway--the
title of a 1925 feminist novel by Virginia Woolf, which
in turn inspires Laura to take the unusual action of
abandoning her family, and in turn is rewritten by Richard
to describe the life of Clarissa in his mythical novel.
To make sense of the film, thus, one might prefer to
read the two novels. Yet never have the dreary lives
of unfulfilled persons been brought to the screen so
vividly. MH
I
want to comment on this film |
The Hours
by Michael Cunningham
The
Hours is both an homage to Virginia Woolf and very
much its own creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings
his literary idol back to life, he intertwines her story
with those of two more contemporary women.
Mrs. Dalloway
by Virginia Woolf
Woolf
explores the relationships between women and men, and
between women.
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