In the first minutes of Stephen Daldry’s “The Hours,” we see three separate women go through similar morning routines. The woman in the English countryside of 1923 checks her complexion as the woman in her New York City apartment of 2001 pulls back her hair as the California housewife of 1951 slips on a bathrobe. Three time periods, three women, and the events of one day could easily spell confusion and disaster for such a complicated film, but “The Hours” endures its complexiy, delivering two hours of seamless movie magic.
Based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel of the same name, “The Hours,” takes a heart-wrenching look into the lives of three women all somehow affected by Virginia Woolf’s novel, “Mrs. Dalloway.” Meryl Streep plays Clarissa, a contemporary New York City book editor given the nickname Mrs. Dalloway by her poet friend Richard (Ed Harris) who is dying of AIDS. As she prepares a dinner party to honor Richard, we discover that Clarissa’s selfless and manic approach to life serves only to disguise an otherwise blanket unhappiness.
Fifty years prior, in sunny suburban Los Angeles, Laura (Julianne Moore) sets out to bake the perfect cake for her adoring-to-a-fault husband (John C. Reilly) with her delightfully sweet son (Jack Rovello).
As one might expect in a 1950’s melodrama, there exists so much pressure for things to be perfect that, in the end, they rarely are. If “The Hours” and “Far From Heaven” result in Moore being typecast into 50’s suburban mother roles, so be it. She brings a wide-eyed innocence and sweetness to these women, able to broadcast a character’s shear inner-turmoil without dropping the smile from her face.
Decades earlier, Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) deals with her own demons , writing the very novel that so affects Clarissa and Laura years later. Nicole Kidman inhabits Woolf down to the smallest body movement, flawlessly executing the late-author’s reserved sense of despair (as well as donning a wax version of her trademark nose.)
As the stories of these women interweave, Daldry nimbly abandons both time and space. Clarissa’s life begins to mirror the events in the novel Woolf is writing and that Laura is reading.
This isn’t an easy plot for a novel to keep up with, let alone a film, but Daldry separates the three tales just enough to avoid confusion, binding them back together with smooth graphic matches.
“The Hours,” indeed, deals with death, both literal and figurative. These three women are slowly being suffocated by either themselves or their lives. And while we know how Woolf’s life ends, the fates of Clarissa and Laura go on unsealed.
In the traditional sense, “The Hours” is not an uplifting movie; it offers no simple solutions to the characters’ struggles. But when combined with sensitive performances, careful editing and beautiful imagery, it can be called nothing less than life-affirming. nyou
