Don’t be afraid of Virginia Woolf

In
Virginia Woolf’s first book, The Voyage
Out, a character expresses the desire to write a novel about all the things
that people don’t say, an ambition
that the author herself fulfilled in a later book entitled The Waves. Steadfastly devoted to that interior life and those
unspoken thoughts and feelings, inclined to close observation of minute
physical detail and subtle shades of emotion, but haunted by the specter of
insanity throughout her brilliant career, Woolf drowned herself in 1941. That
incident opens The Hours. As the
picture shifts back and forth through time and space, Virginia Woolf’s life,
madness, suicide, and, of course, her art, dominate all the action and
character, so that the movie provides something like a “reading” of both that
life and that work.

            After that opening act, The Hours moves back to the early 1920s,
showing the author working on what many critics consider her first major
achievement, one of her most famous novels, Mrs.
Dalloway. Thereafter, that book dominates the action, characters, and
meanings of the film.

            Sifting through layers of time, the
movie initially situates itself in the London suburb of Richmond, where Woolf
(Nicole Kidman) attempts to write and to cope with her precarious mental state.
She’s assisted by her devoted husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane), who also runs
their small publishing concern, the Hogarth Press. The film then jumps back and
forth frequently to other moments and locations. In addition to the setting in
1920s England, it alternates between Los Angeles in 1951 and Manhattan in 2001.

            Mrs.
Dalloway links the three temporal and spatial settings. A profoundly
unhappy young mother in Los Angeles, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), reads the
book and responds to its images of a woman’s wrong choices, lost opportunities,
failed chances, and vague regrets. Moreover, she also senses the lapping tide
of insanity and the seductive undertow of suicide. In Manhattan, an editor,
Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep), like Clarissa Dalloway in the novel, prepares
an arty party to celebrate the award of a glittering literary prize to her dear
friend and quondam lover, Richard (Ed Harris), a poet dying angrily of AIDS.

            The three ostensibly disparate
narratives occasionally display some specific instances of thematic and
personal connection, showing some small, parallel actions and gestures. All
three main characters sometimes make analogous or overlapping movements or
statements; all three plan one sort of party or another; they gather flowers;
they express at least a moment of homosexual passion.

            More important, they all confront a
terrible and essentially inexplicable emotional crisis in their lives. Virginia
quarrels with Leonard about his attempts to maintain her sanity and she rejects
the advice of her doctors that she seek a quiet suburban life. Laura Brown —
her name must allude to a famous Woolf essay — the vaguest and least
comprehensible of the three, simply cannot manage her life, her young son, her
apparently dull and oppressive marriage. The most vital of the trio, Clarissa
simply wants to keep her beloved friend alive a little longer, give him a
glimmering of hope, make him at least momentarily happy.

            Because the movie cannot reveal the
inner thoughts of its subjects in the characteristic Woolf manner, and avoids
any hint of a voiceover, the three women must either speak to others of their
problems or somehow demonstrate their peculiar desperation by action and expression.
The script, unfortunately, seldom allows their interior life to emerge, either
in speech or in behavior, with Woolf’s clarity and lyricism, as was apparently
intended. So Moore, for example, must wander about with a forced smile shining
through a mist of unshed tears, uttering odd platitudes, and giving
unconvincing reassurances to the sweet little boy who knows she plans to
abandon him.

            The filmmakers’ conception of Woolf
herself touches on the comical. Kidman, sporting some sort of putty nose, a
determinedly plain face, and a really dedicated dour expression, mopes about in
a tatty house dress, annoying the servants, rejecting the compassion of poor
Leonard, and very sensitively observing nature up close. In reality, Woolf
possessed a sort of aristocratic beauty reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites, and
in her photographs, she looks more dreamy than angry — hardly the stern,
recalcitrant character that Kidman portrays. The actor seems to think that
frowning throughout the movie will convey the pain and lunacy of the artist.

            Streep, on the other hand, simply
glows with life and feeling, hinting in all sorts of small, utterly
naturalistic ways at the real passion and the passionate reality of her
character. When she speaks of her love for the dying poet and a small moment of
happiness she shared with him, we believe her absolutely. She inspires such
compassion for her character that we somehow want her to be happy like that
again. She makes her love, her kindness, her terrible pain a hard and comprehensible
fact. The performance represents yet another in a long string of triumphs.

            Despite its careful cinematography,
its distinctive lighting schemes, and its terrific sense of location, The Hours suffers from a fatal
fuzziness. Perhaps a movie based on a highly literary book about another highly
literary book attains a level of preciousness that works against the usual
thrust of cinematic narrative and character development. Streep’s remarkable
performance raises the film to a level it otherwise would not attain, but the
problem of adapting the original material seems to have defeated the efforts of
the screenwriter and the director.

The Hours, starring
Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, Stephen Dillane, Miranda
Richardson, John C. Reilly, Jack Rovello, Ed Harris, Toni Collette, Allison
Janney, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels; screenplay by David Hare; based upon the
novel by Michael Cunningham; directed by Stephen Daldry.

You
can hear George and his movie reviews on WXXI-FM 91.5 Fridays at 7:15 a.m.,
rerun on Saturdays at 11:15 a.m.

This article appears in Jan 15-21, 2003.