Movie Reviews for The Hours

The Hours

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Movie Reviews of The Hours

Movie Review: All Time Favorite Movie
Summary: 5 Stars

This movie can be a confusing setting, but the way director Stephen Daldry crafted the plots makes it a clear film. It starts out with Virginia Woolfe's suicide. Then it progresses to introduce the three women: Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) of 1951 who is living for her husband's sake and her son's sake and suffocating under the pressure to create a perfect household and a flawless image; second to appear again is Virginia Woolfe (Nicole Kidman), who is living according to what her docter's say and her husband wants; and finally, Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep) is a 2001 New York woman living to care for her best friend, Richard (Ed Harris), who is dying of AIDS. Throughout the film, certain characters approach each woman at different times and help reveal that they are all living (and dying, somewhat) for other people. This movie is about how they discover happiness and what this emotion requires.

I believe everyone should see this movie for the acting, alone. Nicole Kidman proves herself to be a magnificent actress that is versatile and will continue to show her skill. As Woolfe, she lets her inner-pain spill out and manifest itself in one of the most spectacular scenes of the movie. Moore was the second best of three. As Brown, a nearly silent role, she feels devastation that she was sucked into the life she has. She really explains this through tears and facial expressions to the point where you have figured her out completely. Streep plays Vaughn a.k.a. Mrs. Dalloway acording to Richard. She literally is living for Richard. Every day she goes to see him, and feed him, and care for him. In the movie, she is buying flowers for him, bragging for him and planning a party for him. Streep really grasps onto Clarrisa Vaughn's sense of unhappiness with life. She has yet to learn what it is to live for herself.

Throughout the rest of the film there are many smaller performances that caught my eye. The first of which is Laura Brown's friend Kitty, played by Acadamy Award nominated Toni Collette. She resembles Mrs. Dalloway in Laura Brown's explanation. She is a confident woman that suffers but does not show it. Collette has an ability to really portray these feelings so well. Another great supporting performance was Ed Harris'. He successfully plays a dying man, slightly insane but one who recognizes Clarissa's problem. John C. Reilly, the boy playing Laura Brown's son and Claire Daines all had shining moments.

Bottom Line: Everything about the making of this film and everything about the acting and the writing were all so hauntingly beautiful it stops you in your tracks and makes you realize that this is a classic of film making. (I give it an A+ and it is number 1 on my Top Ten Favorite Movies List)

Movie Review: Bring your Lithium...
Summary: 5 Stars

That being said, the acting is superb and the film is a masterful work and a great movie to study for aspiring filmmakers, actors and directors. Nicole Kidman's role tends to get the most attention due to the prothsetic nose she wears - but all the actors, from the youngest child on up are at the top of their game.

In the final months of her life, Virginia Woolf wrote the story of "Mrs. Dalloway," a lonely housefrau who eventually takes her life and surprised everyone... because she did it "for no reason." Her novel reveals much of her inner turmoil - that she is a person that can be understood by no one, not even herself. Her depression so consumes her, that she cannot see clear from it. More than just consistantly mopey, she is almost devoid of any emotions, but when her emotions peak, they are of loneliness and sadness. She experiences guilt for the emotional baggage she has thrown into the lap of her husband and has such a low self-esteem that she lets her housekeepers openly mock her.

The film shifts forward and back in time - opening w/ Woolf's suicide, then jumping to 1951, where Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is a lonley housefrau herself, reading Woolf's novel. The film then moves to 2001 with an equally lonely divorcee, now lesbian, who is such the embodiment of Woolf's depressed character that her best friend refers to her as "Mrs. Dalloway." Ed Harris plays her best friend and ex-lover who is in the final stages of full-blown AIDS. He, too, struggles with loneliness and depression, as most of his so-called friends have abandoned him to his terminal illness.

The theme that each person is an island and that we all truly die alone is persistent throughout.

Like Woolf (who was sexually abused as a child by her own step brothers), all the principal characters have major sexual identity issues. They do not know whether they are gay, straight or just asexual... and this causes some extremely awkward scenes that will make you squirm in your seat. They all behave as though they do not fit in their own bodies. While they know how to "play the game" to fit in with "normal" society, they are alien to it and play with the though of death as the "great escape" from the prison of what their lives have become.

This is a superb film, but it is an experience that is not for the faint of heart. Those who have lost a loved one to suicide will find no solace in this story, and those who are suffering from depression should avoid it altogether. As someone who is not suffering from depression, I walked out of the movie feeling like a wet dish rag.

Fans of Kidman, Moore and Streep will not be disappointed. Toni Collette's performance, while brief, is also powerful. This is not a film you just see - it is an experience.

Movie Review: Provocative and hopeful
Summary: 5 Stars

The complex storyline focuses on one day in the lives of three women from three different generations. Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is living outside of London with her husband in 1923, recovering from mental illness and beginning work on her now famous novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is a 1950's suburban housewife, married to a World War II veteran (John C. Reilly), raising a small boy while expecting another child. And then there is Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep), a present-day version of Mrs. Dalloway, so named by her one-time lover and now AIDS-stricken writer Richard (Ed Harris), living in New York and planning one of her renowned parties for him following his reception of a prestigious poetry award.

Yet there is a common thread among them that effaces any `real' normalcy in their lives and ultimately forces each of them to make life-altering decisions. Themes revolving around feminism and sexual preference stir just below the surface. But it is the prevailing sadness of these women brought on by the confinements of a restrictive and often stifling society that is at the core of this film. Their yearning for something more or for that `one perfect moment' in time places each of them in the painful position to question their own existence. The sequences in each of their lives are carefully interwoven throughout the movie, enhancing their parallel struggles.

The Hours is skillfully directed by Stephen Daldry and contains some of the finest performances of the year. Julianne Moore's depiction of Laura Brown is filled with subtlety and nuance. She epitomizes a 1950's housewife with a constant shiny exterior who can barely contain the internal struggle of her life's claustrophobic confinements. Meryl Streep's Clarissa Vaughn, though bound by memories of her past, is somewhat less restricted in her character as a modern New York editor living with her female lover and therefore has more opportunity to display her considerable emotional range.

However it is Nicole Kidman's portrayal of Virginia Woolf that is the most mesmerizing and transforming performance in the film. She is completely submerged as the famous novelist of the early twentieth century. The hype concerning Kidman's prosthetic proboscis and its alleged distraction is much ado about nothing. To the contrary, it enhances her performance and allows her characterization of Virginia Woolf to fully emerge. Audiences will not recognize her, nor should they.

But if it is familiar players and plotlines you are seeking then The Hours is not for you. It is neither fantasy nor escapism, yet what it lacks in pure entertainment it makes up for with introspection and a somewhat hopeful ending.

Movie Review: Sad sad sad sad
Summary: 5 Stars

There are three timelines in "The hours", and director Daldry chose to show them simultaneously; all stories are about one day in the lives of three women. I'll list the three timelines:

1) England, 1923 - Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is trying to write her novel, Mrs. Dalloway; she receives the visit of her sister; she tries to set her life straight, as she's not living the life she wanted, because of medical and psychological problems.

2) California, 1950 - Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is a housewife with a little son; this is the day of her husband's (john C. Reilly) birthday; she's reading Mrs. Dalloway; she has doubts about everything, from her sexuality to her will to go on living.

3) New York, 2001 - Clarissa Vaughn's (Meryl Streep) day is about organizing a party to her friend and ex-one time-lover, the poet and writer Richard (Ed Harris), who is receiving an important prize of lifetime achievment in poetry.

The three stories are connected; the most obvious connection is that Clarissa Vaughn is the modern Mrs. Dalloway. There are recurrent themes in the three stories, all related to Mrs. Dalloway and Virginia Woolf's life: sexual doubts, depressive thoughts, death wishes. Stephen Daldry made a movie more complex than he wanted, without knowing he did it. Uncounsciously, "The hours" is deeper and denser than its director wanted it to be. You have to get a degree in psychology to fully understand all the relationship between the women characters.

Although "The hours" is starred by women, a movie about women, with three of today's top actresses, their constant presence and the fact that the three of them are so sad, depressive and unresolved characters, makes the male actors' (Stephen Dillane, John C. Reilly and Ed Harris) acting excellent. The best one in my opinion is Stephen Dillane's Leonard Woolf.

Two things I didn't like:

A) Meryl Streep lost herself here; her acting seemed a little bit forced and self-conscious, trying to make Clarissa a different character from other characters she's played in other movies: she couldn't do it. I've seen this same Clarissa in other Meryl Streep movies (Meryl Streep is much better in "Adaptation").

B) Nicole Kidman, although in good acting shape, played a character (Virginia Woolf) so sad and depressive that I couldn't care one bit what happened to her. I think the writers exagerated Virginia's depression to make the audience understand better what happened to her, but this trick completely backfired. No one can stand Virgina Woolf in the movie. And the scene with the dead bird is the oldest metaphore ever.

Without any doubt, the real star of the movie is Julianne Moore. As the sad and unloving Laura, she is the most complex, convincing and believable character of "The hours".

There are other aspects of this movie to be discussed, but this review is already too long.

So, to wrap it up,

Grade 8.7/10

Movie Review: In response to the writer from Elmwood, Illinois
Summary: 5 Stars

You make Virginia Woolf seem like she was just some batty neurotic who killed herself because she didn't get along with the maid. In fact, almost everybody knows (and it's established in the movie) that Virginia Woolf was mentally ill. She was in the country because she had a breakdown, and she suffered from what might have been schizophrenia. The stones she put in her pockets in the movie were not heavy-handed symbols of "the weight of the world." When the real Virginia Woolf killed herself, she did it by putting stones in her pocket and walking into the river!

Maybe Julianne Moore's character wanders away not only because she's gay, but because she doesn't want to relegate herself to a life of making cakes. Seems to me that anybody out of the ordinary--gay or not, and especially female--would be opressed and tortured by '50s society. Michael Cunningham's book makes Moore's character's conflicts more pronounced and complex--but I think the movie established the complexity of her character well.

Streep and Moore's problems might not be "extraordinary." Clarissa Vaughn isn't dealing with Sophie's choice. However, I like that the movie deals with the more common problems and issues that face self-aware people. Clarissa Vaughn, especially (like Mrs. Dalloway) shows that sometimes mundane emotions are awfully dramatic, not because they *are*, but because, whether you like it or not, because they feel that way.

Virginia Woolf asked (and I'm completely paraphrasing) "Why are books about wars so much more interesting and important than a book about a day in the life of an average woman?" I think THE HOURS asks that question, and proves that...they aren't!

SPOILER

You said the only character whose decisions you approved of were Moore's because she "chose life." What about Clarissa Vaughn? Everyone talks about what an incorrigable downer THE HOURS is, and I completely disagree. It is exhilerating and uplifting because its message is that, for all of its downfalls and neuroses, life is a beautiful, wonderful thing. Something to be cherished. To quote Cunningham's book:

"There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us everything that we've ever imagined, though everyone but children (and perhaps even they) knows these hours will inevitably be followed by others, far darker and more difficult. Still, we cherish the city, the morning; we hope, more than anything, for more."

Yes it's from the book, and the book is different from the movie. However, I think that the movie conveys this insight, which is beautiful and (I believe) true to the lives of many, wonderfully.