Three stories unravel in The Hours (2002). All are connected by, and themselves mirror, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway (1925). In that novel, a woman prepares for a party later in the evening. Through detailed explorations of her interior world, Woolf gives the lead-up a major psychological and emotional significance, the brief moment representing the character’s entire life in miniature.
Aside from a brief drop by 1941 Sussex, on the day of Mrs Dalloway’s author’s suicide, The Hours’ trio of tales follows three women across a single day. They’re separated by decades and united by their all-consuming depression, among other things. The first story, set in 1923, accompanies Virginia (an infamously plastic-nosed Nicole Kidman) as she readies herself for a visit from her sister (Miranda Richardson) and her kids. Virginia has just moved from England to the sylvan Richmond after several nervous breakdowns, and has just begun work on Mrs Dalloway. She flicks off her husband Leonard’s (Stephen Dillane) requests that she eat some breakfast before starting work for the day — this forthcoming book’s first sentence is still rattling around too loudly in her brain for her to focus on anything else.
The second story transports us to 1951, to one of the many anonymous homes dotting an idyllic Los Angeles suburb. There, we meet Laura (Julianne Moore), a pregnant housewife whose sole task for today is to make her sweet-natured but emotionally clueless husband, Dan (John C. Reilly), a birthday cake. Her young son (Jack Rovello), maturely (and correctly) sensing a torment within his outwardly happy mother, tries lending a hand.
And in the 2001-set third story, a New York City literary editor, Clarissa (Meryl Streep), prepares her apartment for a party. She’s celebrating her former lover and lifelong friend Richard (Ed Harris), a poet recently awarded a major literary prize. He doesn’t want all this fuss. “I’ve stayed alive for you,” Richard, who is coming to the end of a long battle with AIDS, tells Clarissa as she tries getting him excited for this unwanted fête. While distractedly preparing an egg dish for this straining-to-be-merry party later, Clarissa admits that she feels like she’s unraveling — plagued by presentiment. Maybe that summer with Richard all those years ago really was the happiest time of her life.
Though these stories’ larger connection to each other, aside from the Mrs Dalloway thing, cleverly clicks into place eventually, you don’t watch The Hours waiting for it to come together in a perfect braid. As Roger Ebert has put it, it’s more “a meditation on separate episodes linked by a certain sensibility” — a sensibility embodied by Mrs Dalloway, a story where underneath a veneer of normalcy lies an oceanic sorrow deemed worth exploring by its author.
The Hours has a way of submerging you; it’s difficult to temporarily remove yourself from the drama to ponder where it’s all going. It has a flooding effect. The air is so immediately overwashed in an eerily expressive sadness, and the binds of expectation these characters are snared in are so snug, that the power of The Hours never totally rests on how it reveals itself narratively. What matters most is how effectively the film summons its characters’ depression. And it does: the anguish has a rawness that makes you feel like you could touch its nerves and sinews. Phillip Glass’ score, a torrent of agitated strings and waterfallish piano, flares up in the way its characters feel unable to, their true desires constrained by the mores of the times in which they’re living, their current responsibilities, or a combination of the two.
The Hours’ three lead actresses give startling, but never showy, performances. They fluently transmit how much every forced grin or laugh or spell of friendly chit-chat almost physically pains their character. With their measured animation of David Hare’s careful writing (he’s adapting Michael Cunningham’s book of the same name), their work has a way of infecting how we see everything. Objectively pretty sights — the glow of the sun against a river on a sunny day; palm trees swaying against a clear blue sky; a flower shop’s colorful window display — incur loneliness. The mist of depression, which one feels so alone in experiencing, is too thick to fully appreciate everyday loveliness. You can feel these women wishing they could see the world through the eyes of someone happier, more content.
The Hours so evocatively recreates on screen what it’s like to be depressed — I found Laura’s aversion to everything she has been led to believe will bring her joy to be particularly painful, like someone getting a paper cut with every reminder — that I’m not sure how much I’ll remember its other particulars in the future. It’s an enormously sensory movie; the impression you’re left with most is how it makes you feel. (There are a few specific things I won’t forget, though: that masterly scene where Laura gets a visit from a neighbor, played by Toni Collette, who seems to have it all but devastatingly paints over, in mere minutes, the facade; the revealing late-in-the-movie conversation between Clarissa and Richard’s estranged mother.) It’s a great movie defined, above all, for how uncannily it conjures emotional identification. Despite the specificities of its characters’ pain, The Hours finds universalities with such resounding precision that you finish it still underneath its clouds. Days have gone by and I still haven’t quite found a clearing.
Peterson Reviews 