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The Hours
****
Cinema
Reviews - Week of February 14, 2003
Rated on a 4-star scale. Certificate 12A. USA.
114 minutes. Directed by Stephen Daldry. Written by David Hare; from the
novel by Michael Cunningham. Starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Julianne
Moore, Ed Harris, Stephen Dillane, John C. Reilly, Allison Janney, Jack Rovello,
Margo Martindale, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels.
There are times when we find ourselves alone,
fixating on the faces of strangers. Those moments when waiting for someone
in the street, or stopping for a while on a public bench, and watching at
space until time simply drifts away. When angry, we can find ourselves filled
with cynicism at whoever walks by -- despaired at their pettiness, annoyed
by every gesture. And then there are those occasions when you're at one with
society, and your sighs are of understanding, and everyone, happy or sad,
triumphant or pathetic, looks like someone with whom you can
identify.
"The Hours" feels like that. It
captures the feeling of a long, forgiving gaze. At the centre of the story
is Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway", a novel of which I have read perhaps
two or three pages. But not for a moment did I feel confused. It all just
made sense, and I sighed with understanding.
The movie cuts between three different times and
places, telling its stories through a trio of separate women. In the greenery
of Richmond in 1923, Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) begins to write of Mrs.
Dalloway, the English society woman who kept up happy face and arranged lavish
parties as a way to mask inner weariness. In the Los Angeles suburbs of 1949,
a pregnant woman named Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) reads "Mrs. Dalloway"
amid a period of growing anguish about maintaining the mask of happy housewife.
And in the Manhattan of 2001, cosmopolitan publisher Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl
Streep) is a living Mrs. Dalloway, fastidiously arranging a party for her
ex-lover, a poet named Richard Brown (Ed Harris) who is battling AIDS against
his own hopeless will. "When I die, you'll have to think of your own life,"
says Richard to Clarissa, and he means it as a warning.
These women are stuck, and can hardly hide it:
Woolf cannot bear being kept in the country, even though her relocation from
London was intended to give her peace and quiet against her own mental illness.
Laura can feel herself becoming a bad companion and mother; she resents her
well-meaning husband and child, because she cannot stand the constraints
of responsibility. Clarissa is too smart to delude herself into chirpiness,
and the more people remind her of that, the closer she moves toward
meltdown.
Some have called "The Hours" a pathetic prestige
piece, too proper for its own good, what with its showboat roles for tormented
females and its systematic structural concept. The movie has anguish and
issues on the surface, countless ways of showing off the skill of technicians
and actors, and it moves between its stories using match cuts and lyrical
images that are sometimes intended to demonstrate parallels between the stories,
and often simply to give the film a conveniently blended
rhythm.
To me, the construction of the material is a large
part of its power. It was obviously put together with much planning, but
its effect is not rigid. As a whole, the piece flows less like traditional
drama than reverie -- the editing entrances us with a stream of sadness,
and the score, by that genius of the minimalist method Philip Glass, swirls
and drifts in some kind of otherworldly way, suggesting torrents of troubled
thought and poignant moods in the air.
The director is Stephen Daldry, who I expect is
an excited guy, after the international success of his debut feature "Billy
Elliot". Here has free reign, and relishes it -- he might not be as obvious
a kid in a candy store as someone like Quentin Tarantino, but he is making
the most of his newfound power to hire famously talented technicians and
performers. Kidman, Moore and Streep are great leads; they are the kind of
actresses who instinctively embody intelligence and turmoil. Think also of
the exquisite supporting cast, which includes Jeff Daniels, Claire Danes,
John C. Reilly, Toni Collette, Stephen Dillane, Miranda Richardson, Allison
Janney and Eileen Atkins. Danes is in the movie for about five minutes, but
you can feel her breaking free as an actress -- usually she is cast as someone
whiney or intense, and here we see how powerful she can be when performing
naturalism and familiarity.
By the end, when fateful decisions are taken and
connections have been revealed, certain conclusions can be gotten from the
material. Smothering the weak and needy does them little good, but neglecting
them is hardly better. We are sometimes compelled to follow our own paths,
and in other ways forced by conscience to devote ourselves to others, and
it's hard to always know which is best. Sometimes no matter what we do, or
what is done to us, life can be a valley of tears that mere mortals may not
be wise enough to heal for each other.
These messages are interesting because they are
not solutions. The characters in "The Hours" are flawed, and frustrated by
themselves and each other, and the movie approaches these feelings with curiosity
and sympathy. We do not judge the woman who runs for selfish isolation, the
man who ends up a bitter wretch, or even Woolf, despite her suicide. We have
seen them in shots that hold long on their lonely eyes and stances, and as
the corny phrase goes, we have discovered their humanity.
It's probably true that what the world needs now
is love, sweet love, and the first step to that is a little empathy, sober
empathy. "The Hours" gives us that throughout. Then the credits roll, and
we're tossed back out into the real world, and maybe left to baser instincts
like anger and impatience. But the movie understands that. So do all of us,
when the right kinds of daydreams hit.
COPYRIGHT©
2003 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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