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Paula Bardell gives her verdict on one of the most daringly unconventional movies to hit the big screen in many a long year.
I long ago concluded that mainstream cinema had slipped in to a shallow, stagnant pool of tedious wishy-washiness, where it was destined to flail around, ridiculously waving its arms and generally amusing onlookers until some brave and resourceful soul had the wisdom to haul it out. Thankfully, it now seems that Hollywood has finally, if perhaps only momentarily, been dragged to higher ground.
The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry (of Billy Elliot fame), is the most haunting, powerful and intelligent movie to grace our cinemas for many years. The story started life as a Pulitzer Prize-winning Michael Cunningham novel, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, before being adapted for film by David Hare. It concerns a single day in the lives of three, seemingly unconnected women, living in different eras and places – their link, an avant-garde novel written by a melancholy Englishwoman in 1923.
Virginia Woolf, played by an almost unrecognisable Nicole Kidman, struggles against encroaching insanity in the suffocating suburbs of 1920s Surrey. She has started work on the draft of her first great novel, Mrs Dalloway, and is facing a dilemma over who should die. Who, she wonders, should be sacrificed so that others might live?
Julianne Moor plays a fictional 1950s housewife Laura Brown, marooned in a lower middle-class suburb of Los Angeles with her husband and son. She is heavily pregnant and, like Woolf, is paralysed and bewildered by contemporaneous social conventions.
She is reading Mrs Dalloway.
Clarissa Vaughan, played by Meryl Streep, is the editor of a modern-day publishing house in New York. She is throwing a party to celebrate a literary prize awarded to her former lover, a gay poet and novelist, who is slowly dying of Aids. Partly because of her first name, he has nicknamed her Mrs Dalloway.
The women are searching for more potent, meaningful existences. They grapple with the same inner doubts; every glance and gesture indicative of suppressed desperation and innate turmoil. Their stories intermingle (for instance, all three are shown breaking eggs against mixing bowls), their lives eventually coming together in one intensely moving climax.
The Hours isn’t a film for children, or for those seeking light entertainment. There are no gun battles, fast cars or quick-laugh gags, rather silence, yearning and transmigration. It is a work that demands, and rewards, your complete attention. Indeed, it is probably best described as a thinking woman’s film. However, if your intellect is stimulated by experimental, literary, stream-of-consciousness cinema, then this daringly unconventional film may be for you.
About the Author
Paula is a freelance writer and the editor of All Info-About Poetry http://poetry.allinfo-about.com and All Info About English Culture http://englishculture.allinfoabout.com. You can drop her a line at paula-bardell@freelance-worker.com.
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