Review

Review Date: 26-January-03
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Junk

The Hours (2002)

At one point in "The Hours" a dying man, played by Ed Harris, complains that the only reason he has won a prestigious poetry award is because he has AIDS. And this, my friends, is the only moment in the entire movie which I enjoyed, although I didn't realize it until after I escaped the torture of watching the film and was able to recognize how ironic it was. For what the Harris character rightly reviles --- the patronizing instinct of polite and well-meaning society to idealize what they fear or pity but don't want to understand --- explains in a nutshell why "The Hours" exists, both in book form (Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer prize winning novel) and as a movie. This is a picture that simply drowns in its own shallow, politically correct pretentiousness, and takes all viewers down with it.

"The Hours" moves back and forth between the somewhat connected stories of three women: Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), who is writing "Mrs. Dalloway" in the 1920s and working up to suicide; Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a 1950s housewife who is reading "Mrs. Dalloway" and contemplating suicide; and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a modern-day New Yorker planning a party for her friend Richard (Harris), who affectionately calls her "Mrs. Dalloway." Each woman is shown on a pivotal day in her life, struggling with madness, futility, conflicted sexuality, and the specter of death, and to make sure we understand that they unknowingly share each other's pain, director Stephen Daldry provides lots of cutesy visual links between them (they all look into the mirror at the same time, one puts down a vase of flowers and another immediately picks up some flowers, etc.). Each woman is also shown to be loved by others who help to define their lives, including Woolf's husband and sister, Laura's little boy, and Clarissa's lover and daughter (in addition to Richard, whom she adores most of all). In the end, all the women arrive at different momentous decisions, which represent a sort of chronologically evolving response to desperation.

"The Hours" is inflicted with an extremely invasive soundtrack of grandiose classical music, which is exactly what it deserves. Despite the undeniable talent of the actors, there is not a single line or scene in the entire film that feels natural or believable; it's all a self-conscious attempt at representing (British accent here, please) The Great Drama of Life. Frankly, I don't know what's worse: the mainstream conceit of drama as requiring criminals, sex, and violence, or the more arty conceit of drama as requiring mentally ill bisexual authors, repressed bisexual housewives, and fabulously rich and cultured bisexual New York editors with gay friends dying of AIDS. (But wait, there's more --- they all want to kill themselves!) Everything about "The Hours" appears to be designed so that people who have never met a bisexual or a writer and have sure as hell never read Virginia Woolf ‹ but think it would be simply fascinating to do so --- can plunk down $8.00 and walk away feeling urbane, well rounded, and intellectual. No doubt there is much to think about, feel about, and learn about in the themes of mental illness, dying, love, and sexuality, but "The Hours" does not address any of these with frankness. Instead, it relies entirely on narrow-minded perceptions that gays, dying people, artists, and women must naturally lead deep, dramatic, tortured lives full of intense meaning --- which are marvelously entertaining when viewed from a safe, glossy, condescending distance.

I disliked "The Hours" as a book, but the large number of impressive actors who signed on for the movie hinted that maybe it got at something which Cunningham did not. (In addition to Kidman, Moore, Streep, and Harris, the cast includes Allison Janney, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, John C. Reilly, Toni Collette, Stephen Dillane, and Miranda Richardson.) Now I realize that while these people may have all been hoodwinked into thinking they were contributing to a serious work of art, they are in fact on board solely to enhance the movie's pedigree --- which is the only thing it really cares about.

Copyright © 2003 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.