‘The Hours’ weaves a moving film tale

I was going to impress you with an intellectual ditty that compared and contrasted Virginia Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway,” Michael Cunningham’s prize-winning book, “The Hours” and Stephen Daldry’s stunning film of the same title. I was practically positive I could coax out some vaguely brilliant insights into how Daldry (“Billy Elliot”) adapted his cinematic style to the literary mood both Woolf and Cunningham created. But in the time between seeing the film and writing this review, my focus has shifted from analyzing the “hows” to thinking about the “whys.”

When I first saw the film, I was worried that few people would be interested in watching a movie that was basically about the trivia of anguished lives. But since that time, my own life has become rather anguished by the terminal illness of my father. Suddenly, the emotional content of this film didn’t seem very trivial at all. With one phone call (and three weeks at his bedside) I now understand how all consuming the proper mix of medicines, the need to have some daily relief from life and death responsibility, the pain of watching someone you love dearly as they become less than they once were, and yes, even the right flowers can become.

These are similar situations faced by the curious mix of characters in the film version of “The Hours.” The challenging storyline interweaves the lives of three women from different time periods. The film starts with the real-life suicide of English writer Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman). In the early spring of 1941, Woolf loaded her pockets with stones and walked into a river where she drowned. In her note to her husband of 29 years, Leonard Woolf, she talks of her fear of going mad, yet again. Her suicide is a gift to her husband and caretaker. She wants to spare him from the pain of putting his own life on hold to fan the flickering embers of her own.

From that ominous beginning, we jump forward in time to learn about the lives of two other women. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is the quintessentially perfect housewife of the 1950’s. Her life could be an advertisement for post-war dreams come true. And yet for Laura, this suburban dream has become a nightmare. The high expectations of a husband still deep in the throes of posttraumatic shock syndrome and the quiet demands of her emotionally attached son are slowly driving her mad.

The other woman lives in the present. Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) lives with her lover, Sally (Allison Janney). Her former lover, Richard (Ed Harris) is dying of AIDS. But Clarissa is determined to throw a party for him to celebrate a prestigious literary award he has just won for an obscure novel loosely based on his life with Clarissa.

What connects the lives of all these women from different time periods? Is it the tedium and glory we all share as human beings who must make our way through the tunnel of life one second, one minute, one hour at a time? Yes, in part.

The thread of Woolf’s novel, “Mrs. Dalloway,” also sews these three time periods together. Richard calls Clarissa “Mrs. Dalloway” because she shares the same first name with Woolf’s character and in this film, Clarissa spends most of the day preparing for a party, just as Mrs. Dalloway did in Woolf’s novel (and Clarissa’s lover Sally shares her name with the friend Mrs. Dalloway kissed in what may have been her most passionately lived moment.) It is also this very same novel that Laura Brown is reading as she contemplates how to escape her life of cracker box minutia. But is there a deeper, more direct connection between these women, one that spans time and reveals meaning? You bet there is and itís what makes this rather convoluted journey worth taking.

Kidman’s performance is the queen-pin to this film and nothing else in it quite measures up, with the exception of the performances of Ed Harris and the always-wonderful Toni Collette, who plays Kitty, Laura Brown’s doomed neighbor. Yet, it’s easy to forgive some of the more hard to take parts of this movie when you step back and view it as a whole. Like a life well lived, this film has its ups and downs. But as the story demonstrates, in the end it’s not what we know of others, but what we can accept, love, and forgive in ourselves that holds deeper value.