depending on gender
|
depending on gender |
THE HOURS
|
When Virginia Woolf drowned herself in the River Ouse, weighting her bathrobe's pockets with rocks, she was 59, had been hospitalized numerous times with bouts of violent madness, and had attempted suicide at least once, 28 years earlier.
Oh dear, this review doesn't sound respectful at all.
So here is the conundrum in reviewing The Hours. It's wonderfully well made, with an all-star cast (not a has-been in the bunch), structurally exact, and lushly shot. It's as if the film has sought to pre-empt any refuge for the unwowed curmudgeon short of a glowering, brow-contracted, masculine harrumph. Because The Hours is a woman's film from beginning to end, consciously so. Each protagonist is a woman:
Of the three, we zoom in on Clarissa, for her life is reprising, twenty-first-century fashion, Woolf's best-known heroine, Mrs. Dalloway: her name the same, her role (Richard even calls her Mrs. Dalloway, not once but multiple times), her lover (Sally, the same as Mrs. Dalloway's lifelong friend), her day (she is planning a party for Richard, just as Mrs. Dalloway did in Woolf's novel). Thus Clarissa's life bookends Woolf's story.
Yet … Clarissa is artificial. Her first line of dialog is a deliberately juxtaposed echo of Woolf's first line in Mrs. Dalloway. Her storyline's climax is heralded by a further direct quote from Mrs. Dalloway. At every turn the film shackles her to Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. Yet our Clarissa is invincibly unaware of this, despite herself being a novel editor – despite, in fact, having been fictionalized and trashed in a fictional novel written by Richard! Her 'life' is an author's construct designed to resonate with the other two lives, Virginia's and Laura's … and her oblivion to the coincidences makes her not real, no matter how many well-known Meryl-Streep mannerisms she is bequeathed.
Nor is Kidman's Virginia real. For all her camouflage – nose, wig, frumpy clothes – Kidman acts Woolf as the imperious center of attention, allegedly afraid of the help yet superciliously dictatorial to the maid (shooing her out of the house on a wild goose chase to have private time with her sister), dismissing her family and loved ones for wanting to be social when she has become transported by an authorial reverie, sharply upbraiding her long-suffering husband Leonard (Stephen Dillane, WELCOME TO SARAJEVO) whenever he tries to pre-empt her next descent into madness, and smugly delivering her literary achievements ("I think I've found my opening sentence," she says, tabby cat mouth-dropping dead bird – yes, Virginia, there is a dead-bird-garden-burial, together with obligatory symbolic parallelism). I just flat-out don't believe the real Virginia Woolf could possibly have been like this; neither her life nor her fiction suggests it. To allow Virginia to be so queenly is either a bad performance or bad direction.
Squeezed in between these two emotionally powerful stories is meek Laura, Madonna with a mute little only-begotten son. At first Laura's tale seems a throwaway, her life an embossed red leatherette album of Ektachrome prints out of Look magazine (nobody ever had a house that Fanatically Fabulous Fifties). Her husband (John C. Reilly, CHICAGO out of BOOGIE NIGHTS) is a doting chump (features by Mr. Potato Head) who wants only a stable placid home life and a chocolate cake baked for his birthday. Son Richie is a lemur-eyed alien with a crew cut, Davy Crockett pajamas, an Erector Set, and Lincoln Logs. But, for reasons we do not know and never uncover, this familial prospect undoes her.
Unlike her attendant angelic triptych wing saints, Laura is real. As the movie brings its stories together, connecting them with more than just visual parallels, her story becomes the most important, and she becomes the one who changes, the one about whom we most care, to the point where the film's emotional climax, which unexpectedly centers on Laura, is moving and delicate.
The supporting performance are as perfect as one would expect. Jeff Daniels (THE PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO, GETTYSBURG, PLEASANTVILLE) shows the ability to submerge into even a one-scene character so brilliantly it makes you wonder yet again why he took the money for DUMB AND DUMBER. Ed Harris does Jackson Pollock on AIDS instead of booze (flashing all of Kubler-Ross's stages at once), Allison Janney (a virtual cameo in PRIMARY COLORS) also serves who only stands and gapes, and Toni Collette (MURIEL'S WEDDING) defines and then destroys herself in five minutes. Eileen Atkins (who, I Googled, wrote the screenplay for the film adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway) and Claire Danes are barely onscreen long enough to be recognized.
To make artifice of a writer's life is a kind of grave-robbing; a writer has the birthright to do that herself, whether as a practical matron (Mrs. Dalloway) or a gender-bending immortal (Orlando, made into a wonderfully surreal movie starring Tilda Swinton). Virginia Woolf was complicated, self-absorbed, bipolar, sexually ambiguous, personally anxious, and emotionally masochistic. She put all that into her fiction, where it belongs. The Hours, intended as homage, to me felt as if Woolf's life and fiction had been blender-pureed into a modern movie energy-drink. I appreciated it but, except at the end, felt it only from a distance.
When the lights came up, Nancy was weeping silently.