Movies into Film
The Hours
Directed by Stephen Daldry
USA, 2002
Biting into a Lemon
Jack Rovello and Julianne Moore bake a cake in The Hours. (Photo: Miramax/Paramount)
Simultaneously coy and overblown, The Hours is a movie for persons who congratulate themselves on their own good taste. There’s so much scrupulous, unerring good taste on display here that when Nicole Kidman’s Virginia Woolf wafts into a scenic river to drown, the production design might well be dubbed Suicide by Hallmark.
And suicide, persistent nagging thoughts of suicide—the unbilled star of the movie—fuels The Hours’ choked little engine. Ambitious in scope yet narrow in concept, The Hours, which leaps back and forth between the 1920s, 40s, 50s and the present, purports to have great insights into those two old English-major favorites: sex and death. What the filmmakers actually do is pile on morbidity and gloom, as if those traits automatically confer intellectual heft.
Kidman’s Woolf and Julianne Moore’s dishrag plain Laura are gay women confined miserably to conventional marriages; Meryl Streep’s Clarissa is openly lesbian. Yet she’s miserable, too. She longs for the trappings the other women eschew. Clarissa’s wild dream was to have lived her life in a house by the beach with her first great love Richard (Ed Harris), a man now in the final stages of AIDS. Richard, however, spurned Clarissa for Lewis (Jeff Daniels, hideously overweight) and Clarissa—not to be outdone—takes up with Sally (Allison Janney, an engaging actress given nothing to do). Meanwhile, somewhere in time, Woolf and Laura struggle with their sexuality, and the movie staggers frantically between disunities. It has to stagger frantically to obscure the self-important pointlessness of it all.
The screenplay (by David Hare), the direction (by Stephen Daldry), and the overbearing score (by Philip Glass) are flat-out, grade-A pedigreed pretension wrong. As Clarissa prepares for a party in Richard’s honor, she listens to Jessye Norman’s majestic recording of Strauss’ Four Last Songs; Lewis stops by her apartment, and Clarissa turns the CD off rather than lower the volume. I suppose that Ms. Norman’s voice might distract from the vapid dialogue Daniels and Streep sling at each other (“So, how’s San Francisco?”) but couldn’t Daldry have muted Philip Glass? Instead, we’re subject to the monotonous drivel Glass fobs off as music in scene upon relentless scene.
Streep, even more wired and jittery than in Adaptation, suggests greater complications in Clarissa’s unease than the script illuminates. If she’s so unstrung from her regrets over not being Richard’s wife, as well as off balance from enduring the dying man’s verbal abuse, why doesn’t she share her confusion with Sally, who as Janney embodies her certainly seems loving and patient and accepting? We’re told that Sally and Clarissa have been together for 10 years, yet the filmmakers don’t establish a bond between the women. They come across as near strangers who happen to share co-housing—and the same bed. Late in the movie, the fresh and beautiful Claire Danes appears for a scene or two as Streep’s daughter, and she infuses a bit of life. Danes brings with her some of the playful mood from Igby Goes Down, even if she’s stuck with the single worst line of dialogue in recent memory (“All the old ghosts are re-assembling...”).
I loved Kidman in Eyes Wide Shut and Portrait of a Lady, yet The Hours conceives Woolf as such a blank (literary window-dressing) that the actress shows none of her usual range. She suffers nobly, and that’s all. Kidman has the additional misfortune to play opposite Miranda Richardson (as Vanessa Bell), and the classically-trained British actress simply leaves the star exposed. Contrary to what you’ve read elsewhere, top acting honors go to 8-year-old Jack Rovello as Laura’s abandoned son. His flashing eyes and his anguished screams tear right through the dross; this little kid is the most alive thing in the picture.
– N.P.THOMPSON
January 2003
Movies into Film
© N.P. Thompson, 2004
npt [at] moviesintofilm [dot] com