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Much like the Michael Cunningham novel
it’s based on, The Hours is tony and allusive. It’s about
three women living in different eras during a single day: Virginia
Woolf (Nicole Kidman), who is writing Mrs. Dalloway in 1923;
Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a deeply unhappy wife and mother in
Los Angeles in 1951 who is engulfed in reading Mrs. Dalloway;
and Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep), a contemporary New York personification
of Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway, who is preparing a party for an old
love, Richard (Ed Harris), a gay poet in the final stages of aids.
At his best, Stephen Daldry, who directed from a script by David
Hare, makes the intertwinings among these lives seem mysteriously
apt; he gets at the ways in which literature can close us off from
the world and yet unify us with others who have read the same books.
Cunningham’s novel was an aesthetic conceit, a set of themes and
variations on Mrs. Dalloway, and the film puts some flesh
on its delicate, brittle bones. (It also adds, unfortunately, Philip
Glass’s aural wallpaper.) If all three of the women’s lives had
come across with equal weight and artistry, the film, which glides
back and forth among them, might have approached the symphonic.
But only the Streep section truly inspires the kind of awe and terror
that the film as a whole strives for.
Streep is having a good run of it this month: First Adaptation,
where she seemed newly freed-up and languorous, and now The Hours,
where her pinpoint sensitivities are so expressive that you feel
as if you’re inside her skin. On the surface, Clarissa has a comfortable
life: She’s lived for ten years with the same woman (Allison Janney),
has been a book editor with the same publisher for years, and has
an agreeably cynical daughter (Claire Danes) who is helping out
on the day of the party. Her avid preparations for the celebration
are a distraction from the inevitable truth that Richard is dying.
Her initial scene with him, where he lashes out at her in his apartment
and she vibrates with hurt and rage and sadness, is a master class
in how an actress can calibrate a vast complex of emotions and yet
seem wholly intuitive. (Ed Harris, alas, is as overwrought as Streep
is nuanced.) Streep hasn’t always worked in this way; often her
technique honed her responses too finely. What’s changed here is
that she’s internalized so much of her character’s ardent spirit
that when she lets out her emotions, they are already fully formed.
Like the two other women, Clarissa is freighted by the filmmakers
with too much victimology -- her hurts are displayed as a species
of heroism particular to women -- but Streep’s vividness avoids
easy labeling. Clarissa’s heroism is both mundane and thrilling:
She endures because, finally, she loves life for what it is, not
for what it can be.
Virginia Woolf is the muse of the film, and Nicole Kidman tries
hard to invest her with the kind of passion and frailty that would
convey both her madness and her fierce sanity. But a prosthetic
nose doesn’t help her performance -- she looks more like Margaret
Hamilton in The Wizard of Oz than like Woolf. (If the filmmakers
were so intent on getting an actress to look like Woolf, they should
have just hired Shelley Duvall.) The writer’s wounded soul is offered
up to us as a kind of talisman, and there’s something too sacrificial,
too noble, in such a ploy. When Woolf drowns herself, it is not
so much a life that has been taken away as a legend that has been
born.
Julianne Moore is doing a variation on the same kind of fifties
repressiveness that she pulled off in Far From Heaven. (Why
do so many filmmakers now have it in for the fifties?) She’s becoming
too good at this sort of thing: Her glazed neurasthenia in these
films is very Stepford Wives–ish. Her character, Laura, is
supposed to be fully alive only when she is reading Mrs. Dalloway.
Her inner life is supposed to be her real one; the outer one, which
keeps cracking, is just for show. But Laura doesn’t seem to have
much going on inside her, either -- her zombification is more than
skin-deep.
The Hours is intended as a testament to the belief that,
despite appearances, there are no ordinary lives. The filmmakers
want us to know that if we peer deeply enough into the quotidian,
we will be exalted by the sheer humanity of what we find. This is
certainly true of the scenes with Streep’s Clarissa Vaughn, but
as for the other women, what we are left with is a puzzling and
forbidding strangeness. (1 hr. 50 mins.; PG-13) —PETER RAINER.
Opens December 27
• Showtimes
& tickets (movietickets.com)
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