The Hours

by Peggy Sugarman

Genre: Drama
Starring: Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep & Ed Harris
Run time: 114 Minutes
Directed by Stephen Daldry

The credits were rolling down the black screen when the full impact of the The Hours descended upon me. I managed to make it to the women’s restroom before the tears started falling. It still embarrasses me to cry in public. I should say right up front that I thought this a terrific movie and will therefore stand firm against those critics who decry it as “a preposterous faux-feminist manifesto that blames the woes of the modern day female on her historical disconnectedness” (Slant Magazine.com). Actually, I can see why it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but I hope that I can provide something of value so as to encourage you to see this film if you haven’t already.

The film takes us to Richmond, England while Virginia Woolf (played by Nicole Kidman) is writing Mrs. Dalloway. The movie then weaves between the lives of two other women, with Mrs. Dalloway providing the connecting threads between the three: Virginia, caught up with the fate of her characters in her emerging novel (“Someone must die,” she muses); Laura Brown (played by Julianne Moore), a young, pregnant wife and mother fighting a losing battle with a long-standing inability to fit into what American society expected of middle-class women in 1949; and the modern-day Clarissa (Meryl Streep) who is planning a New York party to celebrate her once-upon-a-time lover’s lifetime achievement award for his poetry. Ed Harris plays the role of Richard, the gay poet and writer who is in the final stages of AIDS-related dementia. (“Do you think they would have given me this award if I wasn’t dying?” he spits out to Clarissa as she tried to coax him into attending her party.)

You might think that weaving the three time periods into a coherent film would be confusing. While I haven’t read the Pulitzer Prize winner The Hours by Michael Cunningham (published in 1998), I have read Mrs. Dalloway (published in 1925), the latter of which provides some stabilizing force for understanding the significance of some of the events and dialog.

Modern-day Clarissa is giving a party. “I think I’ll buy the flowers myself!” she says as the original Clarissa Dalloway decides to do in Woolf’s novel. Both characters busy themselves with the activities of the day, driven by the tasks that must be done in order to give a proper party in any era. Pregnant Laura, meanwhile, is reading Mrs. Dalloway in her small, crackerbox, post WWII home. Even she is struggling with a party of sorts: it is her husband’s birthday, and she rouses herself enough to attempt to bake a cake with which she and her young son intend to surprise him when he returns from home.

However, only in the novel, Mrs. Dalloway, does any party materialize. Clarissa finds disturbed and deathly ill poet, Richard, madly ripping down the curtains in his dingy New York industrial apartment trying to find the light as she enters to help him get ready for the party. In an agonizing scene, he recounts his love for her (she has a prominent role in his new novel, which took 10 years for him to write and was described by other characters in the movie as “difficult”) before taking the final step that concludes one’s history. This scene, a parallel of which is found in Mrs. Dalloway, is difficult to watch, but Ed Harris and Meryl Streep really deliver the powerful performances we all have come to take for granted.

Laura Brown also struggles with the prospect of living, seeming to gain courage from the pages of Mrs. Dalloway. We only get a glimpse of her thoughts; Julianne Moore mastered the Eleanor Rigby face as she struggled with her desire to flee from her husband and young son. We find that Laura was a lesbian, as were Virginia and modern-day Clarissa, when she spontaneously kisses her weeping neighbor. Laura, however, finds a different way to exit her unbearable existence; choosing to live with the unforgivable. “I never had any choice,” she acknowledged with a sigh that had lasted a lifetime.

Virginia Woolf’s lifelong struggle with mental illness is well documented, but this film adds another dimension to it. When her visiting sister, Vanessa, talks about a party she gave in London, Virginia observes what it is like for those who are different to be shunned with a simple statement: “Even crazy people like to be asked.”

The scene that stands out the most for me, however, is the conversation between Virginia and her husband after she escapes from the watchful eyes of her husband and servants. She is sitting at the train station, determined to go back to London. Her husband overtakes her and tries to take her back to the house, arguing that London caused her to be unhappy in the first place. This is why he brought her to Richmond – to rest. His tone is paternal. She struggles; it is a difficult thing to prevail in any argument when the other person dismissively assumes you are too ill to know what is good for you. But Virginia reaches inside of herself and says, “You say that you must live with the fear of my extinction. But I live with it too!” Nicole Kidman’s magnificent portrayal of the struggle with suicidal depression is so convincing that I found myself pleading along side of her: Let her go! Please let her go!

For me, the theme of the movie wasn’t so much about homosexuality, nor was it about suicide, although both are significant aspects. Nor was it about the prosthetic nose that changed Nicole Kidman’s appearance so dramatically. It is, rather, a magnifying glass on suffering; the hours that must be faced and endured by those for whom living is so painful. For any of you who have lost someone to suicide, this movie illuminates a grim reality: love cannot always prevent this tragedy.

Peggy Sugarman has spent 25 years working in California's workers' compensation system, having served 8 years as the Chief Deputy Director of the state's regulatory agency. She holds a Master's degree in Counseling and is currently consulting for the California Applicants' Attorneys Association -- an organization of attorneys who represent workers and fights for legislation to help workers who are injured on the job. She occasionally writes for on-line publications and is working on her first novel. She and her husband and two daughters reside in Oakland, California.

You can email Peggy with movies you’d like to see reviewed at Psugarman7@aol.com