P & L,
I don't think all the characters in The Hours were miserable. I think Mr. Brown was happy in his simplicity, although he is almost non-existent in the book.
Laura Brown is the most unhappy of the characters, perhaps because, unlike Virginia Woolf, she is unable to speak up for herself. Woolf's problems were probably organic but she was a great deal stronger than either Laura Brown or Clarissa Vaughan.
I think Clarissa was confused. She truly loved Richard who was available for a full hetero-sexual relationship. She couldn't let go of him and wanted the best for him, something that perhaps his mother never did, or rather did in a way that was not of her time. She considered suicide but could not kill herself but rather chose to remove herself from her unhappiness and, perhaps, keep her unhappiness from tarnishing the lives of her children.
Just returned from seeing The Hours & am still rather stunned by the experience. So I decided to see what Margaret & David (from the Oz TV program, THE MOVIE SHOW) had to say about it:
http://www.sbs.com.au/movieshow/reviews.php3?id=1056
I also read A2Kers responses to the film on this thread ... Interesting & varied. Reactions seem so subjective, but then so is mine:
OK, so what did I make of it? It seemed to me to be about choices ... the conflicts between personal freedom to do what we want/need vs the needs of those who love & depend on us. For example, Virginia has had enough of the pain & anguish of her mental condition, which has stopped her from living the life she would dearly love to live in London. Death would be "liberation"/freedom for her from the pain of the life she is forced to lead, if she is to survive. Despite Leonard's love, commitment & constant care, Virginia chooses to end the torment that her life has become. Yet choosing to die means a "betrayal" of Leonard.
Laura Brown will surely die if she stays within the smothering confines of her husband's love in suburbia .... She constantly contemplates suicide as an escape & finally deserts her family after the birth of her second child. Her decision to leave or die is made so much more difficult because of her love & feelings of guilt toward her son, Richie, who seems excruciatingly aware of the pain his mother is experiencing. He knows what a delicate balance the situation is.
Richie, as an adult, is dying of AIDs & his life has become as narrow, painful & constricted as Virginia's was, in Richmond with Leonard. For years Clarissa has cared for him, supported him, loved him ... More than anything, he wants this debilitating existence to end. Death would be freedom, release, a blessing ... but it would also be a betrayal of Clarissa's love & support.
It seemed odd & rather disturbing for me to acknowledge, in all 3 cases, that the decision to die/leave/desert/betray seemed perfectly reasonable ones, a RELIEF in the circumstances. This despite the fact that all 3 characters who made this difficult decision were fully aware of how their choice would affect those they loved most & depended on them. <sigh>
I was very moved by the roles of the children in The Hours: Richie watching his mother's struggle & Vanessa's daughter's receptiveness to Virginia's feelings.
Hmmmm ... Still a lot more to think about here ...
Here's a review from the NYT that I found very interesting:
FILM REVIEW; Who's Afraid Like Virginia Woolf?
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
In ''The Hours'' Nicole Kidman tunnels like a ferret into the soul of a woman besieged by excruciating bouts of mental illness. As you watch her wrestle with the demon of depression, it is as if its torment has never been shown on the screen before. Directing her desperate, furious stare into the void, her eyes not really focusing, Ms. Kidman, in a performance of astounding bravery, evokes the savage inner war waged by a brilliant mind against a system of faulty wiring that transmits a searing, crazy static into her brain.
But since that woman is the English writer Virginia Woolf (a prosthetic nose helps Ms. Kidman achieve an uncanny physical resemblance), her struggle is a losing battle. On March 28, 1941, Woolf, hounded by inner voices while in the throes of her fourth breakdown, put a stone in her pocket and drowned herself in the Ouse River near the English country house she shared with her husband, Leonard. And in the opening scene of ''The Hours,'' the eloquent, somber screen adaptation of Michael Cunningham's meditation on that suicide (it won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for fiction), Woolf scrawls an anguished farewell letter to her husband, then hurries into the muddy water like Joan of Arc embracing the fire, accompanied by the churning, ethereal strains of Philip Glass's score.
The deeply moving film, directed by Stephen Daldry (''Billy Elliot'') from a screenplay by David Hare that cuts to the bone, is an amazingly faithful screen adaptation of a novel that would seem an unlikely candidate for a movie. A delicate, layered reflection that skips around through time, ''The Hours,'' which opens today in New York, is Mr. Cunningham's homage to Woolf's first great novel, ''Mrs. Dalloway,'' published in 1925.
Woolf's novel details a day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway, a conventional upper-class Englishwoman giving a party, who experiences nagging intimations of the more adventurous life she might have led. On the same day, Septimus Warren Smith, a character in the novel whom she never meets but with whom she shares some of the same observations, commits suicide. Five years ago ''Mrs. Dalloway'' was adapted into a shallow, unsatisfying film starring Vanessa Redgrave. In accomplishing the virtually impossible feat of bringing to the screen that novel's introspective essence, the director and the screenwriter of ''The Hours'' have righted a wrong, albeit by proxy, through Mr. Cunningham's intuitive channeling.
A central idea animating ''Mrs. Dalloway'' and embodied in its stream-of-consciousness language is that people who never meet, like Clarissa Dalloway and Septimus Warren Smith, are connected by experiencing the same external events. ''The Hours'' extends that idea through the decades to celebrate the timelessness of great literature by placing the author, her fictional alter ego and two of her latter-day readers in the same sphere of consciousness.
Interweaving flashbacks from Woolf's life as she was writing ''Mrs. Dalloway'' with scenes from the lives of Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a Southern California housewife and mother in 1951, and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a New York book editor living in contemporary Greenwich Village, their stories blend into a lofty, mystical theme and variations on Woolf's novel.
Laura, who is depressed and agitated, is reading ''Mrs. Dalloway'' on the same day she is baking a birthday cake for her husband, Dan (John C. Reilly), a blunt, hale World War II veteran who dotes on her and barely notices her anguish. Observing and absorbing Laura's distress is her timid, fiercely clinging young son, Richie (Jack Rovello). While baking the cake, Laura receives a surprise visit from a brightly perky neighbor, Kitty (Toni Collette), who is about to go into the hospital to be tested for cancer and admits she's frightened.
Meanwhile, in New York, Clarissa Vaughan (named after Woolf's character) is planning a celebration for her closest friend, Richard Brown (Ed Harris), a poet in the advanced stages of AIDS who has just won a prestigious award. As the movie folds these stories together, it emerges that Richard is Laura's grown-up son. And in a huge risk that pays off, the movie gives the dying poet a sudden flashback to the scared little boy he was (and fundamentally still is). Another bold surreal touch imagines Laura lying on a bed that's suddenly engulfed by the river that took Woolf.
Clarissa and Richard were lovers when they were younger, but both eventually chose partners of the same sex. Richard had a long affair with Louis Waters (Jeff Daniels), now a college professor in San Francisco, who shows up for the celebration of the award. Clarissa has lived for years with a woman, Sally Lester (Allison Janney), and has a college-age daughter, Julia (Claire Danes), from an unknown sperm donor.
Woolf herself was attracted to both men and women, and although her literary alter ego, Mrs. Dalloway, is married to a member of Parliament, on the day of the party her mind darts back to a kiss exchanged with another woman years earlier. In the movie, Woolf's sister Vanessa Bell (Miranda Richardson) visits from London with her family. And Woolf, in a moment of panic, plants a desperate, passionate kiss on Vanessa's mouth. In California, Laura Brown spontaneously reaches out to Kitty with a lingering kiss that is more than polite.
Some of the movie's most wrenching moments show Leonard Woolf (Stephen Dillane) frantically reaching out to his troubled wife and being rebuffed. It's not that the Woolfs don't love each other, but the agony Virginia is enduring can't be touched by love or reason. These moments bring home the film's deepest and most intimidating insight about the essential aloneness of the individual and its feminist corollary: that appearances to the contrary, women in their deepest selves do not and should not define themselves in terms of men.
Clarissa is the most grounded character, probably because she has been the truest to her instincts and has the most love to give back. When Richard, whose good days have dwindled to none, accuses Clarissa (whom he calls Mrs. Dalloway) of forcing him to stay alive, it's obviously true. Mr. Harris, more than matching his tumultuous performance in ''Pollock,'' creates a wrenching, incendiary portrait of a man ravaged with illness, who thrashes with rage and bitterness, his emotions burning out of control like a torched oil slick on a contaminated lake.
Ms. Streep's frayed, moody Clarissa is no hovering, haloed angel of mercy but an intensely self-aware, vulnerable urbanite worn down by her efforts to do the right thing. Through Ms. Streep's performance, the movie captures, like no film I can remember, the immediate, continuing interaction of experience and memory in the instinctive human drive to infuse the moment with meaning and value.
Ms. Moore's Laura, although a reader, lacks Clarissa's or Richard's literary armament and is the more vulnerable for it. A wistful, frightened creature embarrassed by her own china-doll fragility, she longs to escape a life that feels all wrong but has little notion of where to go or what to do. Ms. Moore brings to the role the same luminous demureness that colors her portrayal of an innocent, well-meaning Connecticut housewife whose world shatters in ''Far From Heaven.''
All these brooding, complicated people are prototypical Woolfian figures blessed and afflicted with the same feverish imaginations, perplexing ambiguities and brightly etched memories of their younger, more hopeful selves. Yet for all its sexual complexity, ''The Hours'' is not really about sex. The film, like the novel, is a sustained meditation on connection, human possibility, the elusive dream of happiness and the sometimes seductive call of death.
Although suicide eventually tempts three of the film's characters, ''The Hours'' is not an unduly morbid film. Clear eyed and austerely balanced would be a more accurate description, along with magnificently written and acted. Mr. Glass's surging minimalist score, with its air of cosmic abstraction, serves as ideal connective tissue for a film that breaks down temporal barriers.
Appropriately it is Woolf who has the definitive final word on the questions lurking in the backs of the minds of the film's characters with their flickering life forces.
Leonard Woolf, querying his wife about her decision to kill off a character in ''Mrs. Dalloway,'' asks her why.
She answers carefully, ''Someone has to die that the rest of us should value life more.''
``
Lovely review - wonderful film...
msolga,
what great contributions you have made to this thread. Caused me to completely rethink the movie. While I felt Streep sunk into hysteria later in her role, I loved the conversation she had with Richard as played by Ed Harris who has always been on my list of favorite American actors (others being Dustin Hoffman ... please forgive my post-menopausal memory but names are the first to go ... the actor now playing in Assissination Tango and the Italian-American actor who shared billing with Hoffman in Wag the Dog and who, like the Assissination Tango star first became noted in the Grandfather Trilogy).
I have come to the conclusion that love by itself is never enough and I think the movie The Hours demonstrates that. Mr. Brown, Leonard Woolf and Clarissa Vaughn all love but not unconditionally. Clarissa Vaughn's love for the dying Richard continued beyond Richard's endurance to live. His death in particular is the reclaiming of human dignity. That Laura Brown chose to live but on her own terms is not the reclaiming of dignity but the search for identity. Had Virginia Woolf lived today, she would have been given psychotropic drugs and perhaps lived but perhaps not as creatively.
p.o.m. - Robert Duvall and Robert DeNiro are the names you were reaching for...
macsm,
You are becoming the person here that I can most rely upon!!
Read the novel and saw the film and both are equally worthwhile. The actors brought the characters to life and I was happy to see Nichole Kidman get the Oscar.
I saw the film. Have not read the book or "Mrs. Dalloway".
Several persons in this thread have stated the apparently obvious, that the film is about suicide. I truly had overlooked that "detail".
For me, the film is about axial days in women's lives. Days in which the tangles of existence seem to ravel and unravel rapidly. Three different days, and three different solutions for the suffocating feeling of not being free & themselves, for the impossibility of "finding peace and avoiding life". For the difficulty of dealing with men that love them, but not the way the wish to be loved.
Somehow, I felt the solutions found by Virginia Woolf and Laura Brown as fragile, precarious, while Clarissa Vaugh finds peace, at last, with Edward's suicide.
This is not to change the subject, but, did anyone here also see Almodavar's, "Talk to her"? In one scene in which the Argentinian, whose name I have forgotten, gets up from his bed, on his night stand is a copy of the Michael Cunningham's novel, "The Hours."
The two movies have lots in common.
Am now reading a book of feminist literary criticism by a woman named Annis Pratt who is an archetypical critic. WOW!!
Talk about images and ideas!!!
BTW: do see Talk to Her if you haven't already.
Interesting you should say that, PlainOldMe. Saw the two movies (didn't read The Hours) a week apart. First Talk to Her, about which I can get quite rhapsodic, instantly bought both the DVD and the music CD (Oy ve, that Caetano Veloso version of Cucurucucu!!). Watched about half an hour of The Hours night before last and only got through that much because of the actors -- who are trapped in one of the worst films I've ever seen only half an hour of! Main emotion as I popped it out of the DVD player was wretched embarrassment for all those involved. Guess I better not say anymore...!
hello, Tartarin!
Do tell us me about your thoughts on The Hours! I'd like to hear why you thought it was so excruciating. Interested.
You & PlainOldMe have inspired me to see Talk to Her. I'm (finally!) on holiday for a couple of weeks & will see if I can track it down. A good film might be just the tonic for my jaded state right now.
p.s. LOVE the photograph of the young girl with huge tabby!
Is this you? (I suspect it might be!)
I didn't see enough of "Hours," Msolga, to wax one way or the other, except to mention one good point I forgot -- the lovely, stylized (though not tremendously interesting) cinemaphotography. I'd have to start with a subject I'm uncomfortable with since it's one where I'm at odds with my own culture, and that's about women in that culture. I think we are stuck in a time in which women are not fully liberated: they are trapped (really, trap themselves) in an odd, childlike self-consciousness. Whole lives of navel-gazing. The "gay culture" in this country has many of the same problems.
Oops, yes that's my cat and I'm straining to remember its name.
Wow!! A thread blast from the past!!
I did think Meryl Streep was sometimes over-wrought in The Hours although I did like the conversation between her and Ed Harris' character.
By over-wrought, I mean the scene in the kitchen when she throws herself against the wall, late in the film.
Most actors of Streep's calibre (and I've noticed this in deNiro for the past several years at least) tend to "phone it in." The interesting people to watch are in the smaller roles. Though I only watched that film for -- actually I turned off just after the kitchen scene, when Jeff Daniels turns up early at a party -- I found Alison Janney the most interesting actor in it. Miranda Richardson was wasted. Leonard Woolf was a disaster. I wanted to cry for Ed Harris (who's usually one of my very favorites).
