The Hours
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Movie Reviews of The Hours
Movie Review: Complex, quietly subversive and ballsy
Summary: 5 Stars
This is one film that richly deserved its critical accolades, definitely worth owning, or at least repeated viewings.The characters are nuanced, with multiple and conflicting drives---not the tidy and simplistic cardboard-cutouts Hollywood usually comes up with. The three women---Streep, Moore, and Kidman---are flawlessly directed and lead three vaguely connected, but very parallel lives. Streep and Moore's characters reminded me of so, so many women I've known, both friends and family: women who maintain a happy facade (Streep as a dynamic, cheerful socialite and Moore as a placid suburbian housewife) behind which they are desperately empty, sad, and unfulfilled.
Nicole Kidman puts in the finest performance of her career---I never would've expected it, given the usually vacuous roles she plays, but her Virginia Woolf is nothing short of amazing. You can just feel the towering genius and passion behind the eerie, unhinged exterior. Devoid of makeup and hair coloring, and wearing a bigger prosthetic nose, she actually looks a million times more attractive, and more human, than her usual generic-glam-blonde getup.
Woolf's suicide was a courageous refusal to live a life (in her case, one of chronic mental illness) that she didn't want, could not change and could not otherwise escape. Ed Harris's character also chooses suicide, rather than watch himself die slowly from AIDS. For them, suicide is the only remaining gateway to freedoom and wholeness.
Moore's character finds the only alternative to suicide is to desert her husband and children. Only Streep's character dangles in the middle, mired in the same deep, gnawing and nameless discontent but not yet having found a way out.
What many viewers may find deeply disturbing is the subtext that true existential FREEDOM---a beaten-to-death buzzword after 9/11---is not only very precious but very elusive. Why? Because most of us do not pass the crucible, are simply not willing to pay the REAL price of freedom: leaving behind everything that chains us down. Even if that means killing yourself, or walking out on your family, or coming out of the closet. Unwilling to let go of our lives, we become trapped in the misery of this clinging cowardice, we become prisoners who can only sit and wait for Death to come and get us, counting the hours dragging by.
And Phillip Glass's magnificent score keeps everything moving along crisply, despite the film's title.
Movie Review: This May Be The Best Dramatic Movie...
Summary: 5 Stars
The Hours may be the best dramatic movie I've ever seen. I watched it last night at the AMC Ahwathuki 24 with my girlfriend. During the first twenty minutes two couples up front in the theater got up and left and I could only guess from their grumbling and non-verbal communication that they were not pleased with the film. They kind of derisively laughed at the screen. It's that kind of movie.At its core, The Hours is simply about a human being's capacity/incapacity to reciprocate love in the face of death. My girlfriend said she couldn't identify with any of the characters in the movie except Claire Dains because they mostly can *not* reciprocate love. Death is inevitable, so why give back love. I thought it was pretty callous and not true of her genuine character. My girlfriend and I talked about the film and our lives and ultimately I reminded her that she, too, felt that way once -- after her divorce -- she wanted to die, and no longer believed in love.
It's a universal theme and in the case of Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore and Ed Harris's characters in the film, they represent an extreme -- they just can *not* give back love in the face of death. And ultimately this is not what most of us want to hear from a movie or a book. We want to know that people can triumph in the face of a day-to-day life that ends in death. To quit, simply doesn't make sense to a great many people (to the point of denying such despair could even be real), and that might be why people who feel negatively about The Hours do feel negatively.
Meryl Streep's character is the most realized in that the character drawn for her *sees* both sides of the range (love in the face of death) and comes to some kind of affirming end. My own opinion is that the ending was the only place in the film that breeched being too melodramatic, but endings -- quite literally -- are difficult.
I would absolutely love to see Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep in another film where they were actually on-screen together for more time. The final scene between them was so intense as to be palpable. They are simply two of the best actors I have ever seen. Nicole Kidman was so good I did not even recognize it was her playing Virginia Wolff for the first few minutes in the film. However, her vehicle in the film was less real to me, in part, because of my own limitations regarding a capacity for love. Perhaps, I just would rather not admit it.
A complex film.
Stacey
Movie Review: Thr Hours of Feelings
Summary: 5 Stars
"The Hours" is easily the best movie of 2002/2003.Based on a Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, "The Hours", it recounts a single day in the life of three women from different times: Virginia Woolf (1923), Laura Brown (1951) and Clarissa Vaughn (2001).
We get three different stories of true emotions, each heartfelt in its own way, combined into over 100 mintues of complex feelings that will have you in tears a couple of times before the end credits start to roll.
The central point of cohesion is Viginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway". Virginia Woolf, an author troubled by by own insanity in Richmond (1923) is in the midst of writing her bookMrs Dalloway. Choosing between living in Richmond and death, Virginia Woolf will finally succumb to the voices in her head by killing herself.
Almost 30 years later, a lonely housewife, Laura Brown in Los Angeles (1951) picks up the book for a read and questions her own life and feelings. She decides to leave while the impact on her son, Richard, is so devastating in years to come. The movie hits a high in a scene when Julianne Moore's character becomes engulfed in a sea of water while in bed.
In 2001, a New York City gay woman being nicknamed "Mrs. Dalloway" by her dying AIDS friend, Richard, questions her own existence and priorities when Richard re-ascertains his love for her before leaping to his death, another emotional high in the movie.
In this well-executed movie, the cast has given stellar performances and props go to all three lead actresses. Nicole Kidman delivers a performance of a lifetime delivering a convinving portrayal of one of the leading authors of all time. Her performance shines through in the scene when she argues with her husband for her own existence at the train station. Perfect!
Julianne Moore is the most outstanding here in her portrayal of a lonely housewife who makes a daring choice to break free and later confronts her son's suicide leap with much bitterness. If there were two Oscars to give, she sure deserves one too. Look for her Oscar-nominated performance in Far From Heaven!
Meryl Streep, as usual, doesn not disappoint in her lesbian role played to great emotions opposite Ed Harris's dying character whom she has stood by all these years. "No two people would have been happier the way we have been."
Simply breathtaking, a masterpiece!
Movie Review: A masterpiece ...
Summary: 5 Stars
I really liked this movie, even if it is rather depressing. As another reviewer said, this is not just a film, it is an experience (and one worth having)... If possible, try to see it when you are not particularly sad, because the story in itself is pretty gloomy. It talks about depression, bleakness, suicide, sexual identity confusion and lack of purpose. The whole film is pervaded by hopelessness and ennui, and the melancholia is omnipresent.
On the other hand, Stephen Daldry (the director) somehow managed to achieve magnificently what previously seemed impossible: a movie based on Cunningham's book, "The hours". Where is the difficulty, you might ask (only if you haven't seen the movie)?. Well, the answer is in the plot of the film, based on three women: Virginia Wolff, Clarissa Vaughan and Laura Brown. They live in different times and cultures, but they share something: a feeling of vacuity, a total absence of matter,an all encompasing emptiness that threatens them... It is really beautiful to see how the film goes seamlessly from one woman's life to that of the other: there is a wonderfully perfect inconsistence that is only explained (and linked) at the end of the movie. You must pay attention, because the film, in order to link the story, shifts permanently forwards and backwards in time. However, that extra attention is compensated when at the last minutes of this movie you comprehend the meaning of the name of the film, and which is the link (besides those that are evident) between these sories.
Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman)is depicted as an intelligent woman battling against madness in the 1923 England, while she starts to write what will be one of her best novels, "Mrs. Dalloway"... Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a successful literary agent in the present, is planning a party for her former lover, who is now dying of AIDS. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a seemingly happy pregnant woman in 1949 Los Angeles, is trying to make a cake for her husband's birthday, while she starts to read "Mrs. Dalloway". Three women, three different lifes but something in common: how to fight against that we cannot touch, against depression, inner demons?.
"The hours" shines... Its light is rather dark, that is true, but it is incredibly good even for someone like me, who generally doesn't like dramas. It is not only a film, but a masterpiece...
Movie Review: Seamless connections...
Summary: 5 Stars
When sitting down to review this superb film, at first the task proved to be problematic. This picture is an adaptation of a prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham, which is loosely based on one of the great modernist novels of the last century, Mrs. Dalloway. In many respects, too, the film touches on the author's life, Virginia Woolf. The singular genius of the film is its fundamental structure, in terms of running all the aforementioned pieces and their themes in tandem. This is extremely clever because this was Woolf's intent when writing Mrs. Dalloway: connecting apparently disparate people and themes in a coalescent manner. Virginia Woolf was an experimental novelist, who successfully used the literary technique known as stream of consciousness. Breaking away from the conventional realist or naturalist forms used predominately in the 19th century, where the narrative was carried along by way of external action, this new technique moved the action into the characters mind, known as interior monologue. In Mrs Dalloway, we are invited into Clarice's mind, gaining access to her memories of childhood and relationships, and at the same time, her life parallels Septimus Warren Smith, a war veteran on the edge of insanity. Their lives become interconnected on a level of thought and time. In ~The Hours~ the lives of three women, existing in three different time periods, run parallel to each other, all searching for meaning, all connected on levels of thought, circumstance and time, all in one seamless narrative. In many films the majority of burden is on the main character, the lead actor, to ensure the project is a success. As there are three distinct narratives in this film, and three leading actors, it would have only taken one weak performance to turn this film into a disaster. I believe the producers knew this and managed to hire probably the top three female actors in Hollywood. Only one received the Oscar, Nicole Kidman, in the role of Virginia Woolf. However, Meryle Streep as Clarisa Vaughn and Julian Moore as Laura Brown put in outstanding performances, who more than deserved this recognition as well.
This is a complicated film but a beautiful one with a haunting soundtrack by Phillip Glass, which demands to be viewed more than once to discover its many nuances, allusions and their connections.