The Hours

I'm not quite sure what to think of The Hours, the movie we watched in class the past week. Its interpretation of Mrs. Dalloway throughout three time periods was certainly interesting. The music was superb, and certainly helped to make the time transitions easy to understand. That is something that most films struggle with, and the confusion makes having multiple storylines and times impractical, if not damning for the movie—fortunately, The Hours managed to avoid this. The visuals were also well done—the hotel scene where water starts filling the room comes to mind. Aesthetically, the movie was very well done.

Now comes the tough part—the plot. The plot was okay. The modern adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway was interesting in how it was done: it didn't do a straight 1-1 adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway, several characters were tweaked, and the film emphasized the darkness of the book. Virginia Woolf's story was interesting to see for biographical information, even if it did sort of glorify Virginia Woolf to almost a parody of the tortured artist, in a way akin to Mark Zuckerberg's glorified cruelness in The Social Network as he hacks out code, abandons his friends, and provokes people while saying smart-ass things at breakneck pace throughout the film, where in real life he was kind of a dick without the cleverness and coolness the film gives him. Virginia doesn't seem exaggerated as Mark did, but there's a subtle itch I can't scratch whenever I see her onscreen. I feel like it was more the writers than anything; Nicole Kidman did a great job in the film. In fact, I feel that that's why I was able to tolerate it; her performance made the exaggerated writing seem almost natural. Lastly we have Laura's story. This I felt was the most inventive adaptation of the novel throughout the movie. The modern adaptation in New York felt a little flat, plus I already knew the story. Virginia Woolf's story was more interesting, but as I mentioned, something felt just a tiny bit off. Laura's story was the story that the modern retelling should have been. It truly seemed to capture the essence of the story, with more depth than any of the other stories. Laura, like Mrs. Dalloway, doesn't necessarily hate any part of her life, but feels she's trapped more than anything. I don't get the impression that she even dislikes her husband, it just seems like she feels she doesn't fit in her current life. This is where Mrs. Dalloway differs from the movie, since Clarissa seems to be happy in her life, but notices she's at the point where she doesn't have any options any more. Laura is clearly depressed, possibly because she doesn't feel she's good enough at the role of housewife to be a part of that lifestyle—she can't even bake a cake and it devastates her.

In class, it was brought up that Richard's suicide was surprising, along with his relation to Laura. Unfortunately, I've seen Fight Club too many times, watched too many Alfred Hitchcock movies, read too much Dan Brown and Chuck Palahniuk, and played too many video games to the point where I can see a twist coming miles away. This movie was no different. I appreciate the foreshadowing in movies—it shows that the writers and director didn't just watch The Sixth Sense and decide that their movie needs a twist like that without support—however, since there was foreshadowing in The Hours, I knew where a lot of it was going. When Virginia says "the poet must die," it was obvious Richard would kill himself. We are supposed to think of Septimus in the novel, but it has an obvious double meaning in the movie, as there has already been so much talk of death by Clarissa and Richard that, given Richard's role as a poet, his death would be no surprise. So when Clarissa walks in Richard's apartment to pill-bottles everywhere, it's no surprise what will follow. Similarly, as to Richard's identity as the same Richard in Laura's story, I had already noted the fact that they had the same name, though I put it off as deep involvement in the Mrs. Dalloway theme at the time. But when there was the second scene of Richard banging on the window after his mother's decision not to commit suicide, I instantly knew—not in a way I should know, by evidence to back this up, but by knowledge of themes, tropes, and cliches of twists in film, fiction, etc. The wedding picture of his mother in Richard's apartment shortly thereafter is just bonus—a confirmation of that which I already knew.

So how does this leave the film? I don't know how to feel about the movie. Perhaps this is what they were aiming for, since Mrs. Dalloway didn't end telling me how to feel, and rather left things unresolved, where I could draw my own conclusions based on everyone's perceptions of Clarissa, including her own. However, I sense that even if the film were intending me to have a sense of not knowing what to think, this is not the way they intended to achieve it. It feels like they scored a hole in one on the wrong hole. The twists I felt were unnecessary, and there could have been a better way to connect the stories, and finish Laura's story. In addition, the entire modern interpretation felt flat. I suppose it was due to the limited time, but I felt little connection to the modern Clarissa, Sally, Richard, etc. Think about it—it took Virginia Woolf over 200 pages to tell the story of Clarissa, Peter, Richard, Septimus, Rezia, Elizabeth, and Mrs. Kilman, which still seems to only get a glimpse into the life of anyone other than Clarissa and maybe Peter. This movie, in two hours tried to tell all of Mrs. Dalloway essentially three times. It was ambitious; it was too ambitious.