The Hours
Directed by Stephen Daldry.
Starring Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Nicole
Kidman, Ed Harris and Toni Collette.
Don’t you just hate when people start talking about ‘the best film of the year’, often just before the Academy Awards. It seems like such an easy way out. How can you compare a film like The Hours with a film like Chicago? Even though Chicago is an enjoyable film it is no more than a piece of fluff, with a bit of song and dance thrown in, next to Stephen Daldry’s masterly The Hours. But I don’t need to call it the best film of the year, the film speaks very well for itself.
Virginia Woolf is plagued by mental illness but begins, this particular day, to write her first great novel Mrs Dalloway. Housewife Laura Brown stays in bed reading the novel two decades later and is so moved that she makes the decision to change her own life forever. In contemporary New York Clarissa Vaughan, a modern Mrs Dalloway, prepares a party for a close friend who has just won a major poetry prize but is dying of AIDS. The lives of these three women are seamlessly interwoven by intricate details such as the moments of love that they cannot grasp.
When I read Michael Cunningham’s novel of the same name I was completely stunned by the beauty of the writing and the complexity of the idea. The women are portrayed from within with such a light touch even though the sadness of life threatens to overwhelm them all. Cunningham’s knowledge of Woolf’s style and ideas showed in many little ways. When I heard that a film was being made I wondered how they would manage to handle the understatement and the interior monologues. Now, all I can say is that Daldry, who also directed Billy Elliot, has put all my fears to rest. On screen, The Hours works just as wonderfully as it does as a novel, thanks to its brilliant cast, fantastic music by Phillip Glass and a near enough perfect screenplay.
Nicole Kidman is unrecognisable as the plain and haunted, chain-smoking Virginia Woolf, Julianne Moore plays homely Laura Brown with compassionate understatement and Meryl Streep does one of the best interpretations of her career as the ever positive but slowly cracking Clarissa Vaughan. The performances of the entire cast are exquisite. Ed Harris’ intensity as the dying poet is almost painful and Toni Collette is eerily cheerful as the typical fifties girl next door.
If you are interested in films exploring life without sentimentality, The Hours is one not to be missed. It is a very sad film in many ways as it deals with difficult issues such as depression and loss but ultimately it is a profoundly optimistic one about enjoying the moment that is now, for it will never return.
Sol
