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“The
Hours” is rated PG-13 for mature thematic elements, some disturbing
images and brief language.
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The Hours
By Joe Williams
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
In sync with the onset of the winter blues, “The Hours”
is the pro-suicide movie America’s been waiting for. Yes, it’s
beautifully acted and lovely to look at, but the punchline of this
prestigious production is that if you’ve got the soul of a
poet, you might as well toss yourself out a window.
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Courtesy
of Paramount Pictures and Miramax Films
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| (Left
to right) Toni Collette as Kitty and Julianne Moore as Laura
Brown in “The Hours.” A Paramount and Miramax Filmpresentation,
“The Hours,” in a Scott Rudin/Robert Fox Production
starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman. |
Hollywood has peddled this potion before, in such films as “Whose
Life is it Anyway?” and “Night Mother.” But whereas
those movies featured characters afflicted with unbearable ailments,
this one features three interwoven stories about characters who
are merely unbearably sensitive.
Nicole Kidman gives a lacerating performance as the melancholy British
novelist Virginia Woolf on the day when she started the novel “Mrs.
Dalloway.” Because the actress disappears inside a historical
figure (thanks in part to a prosthetic nose), she can be forgiven
for implying that a talented woman with writer’s block and
repressed bisexuality is justified in putting rocks in her pocket
and wading into a river. Hey, it actually happened.
But how to justify Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a California housewife
in 1951 who is reading Woolf’s novel when she decides that
the cure for her stifling marriage is a jar full of pills? In the
Michael Cunningham book on which the movie is based, Laura is an
intelligent woman who has put aside her career ambitions in order
to raise her needy son. Here, she’s merely a mopey matron who
turns suicidal over some combination of a botched birthday cake
and a forbidden kiss with the woman next door (Toni Collette).
The third woman in this time-skipping triptych is rock-solid Meryl
Streep. She plays a contemporary New York book editor named Clarissa
(the same surname as Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway) who is planning
a party for her AIDS-infected poet friend Richard (Ed Harris). Whereas
Virginia and Laura are thwarted by society, Clarissa is a fulfilled
lesbian with everything to live for. It is the self-pitying Richard
who flirts with extinction, lamenting that a furtive embrace with
Laura many years earlier was the high point of his life.
Director Stephen Daldry (“Billy Elliot”) uses visual echoes,
recurring themes and a churningly repetitive score by Philip Glass
to bind these stories together. There are three aborted parties,
three meaningful kisses, three bereft bookworms staring into the
abyss. In its structure and craft, “The Hours” is so lyrical
that it refutes its own thesis. Like the music, its narcissistic
characters hammer away at a single discordant note, blind to the
consolations of a world that can still produce enduring literature,
a loving child or a finely wrought film.
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