The Hours (movie)
In 1923, Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is writing "Mrs Dalloway" while suffering from her mental illness. In 1951 Los Angels, a young housewife Mrs Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is reading Woolf's novel "Mrs Dalloway" and has conflicted feeling in her everyday life as a mother and wife. In 2001 New York, Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) is planning a party for her friend Richard who is dying of AIDS. The stroy entwines three women's life sophisticatedly.
Laura pretends a good wife and good mother, but she notices another herself in the back of her mind. She leaves her son at her friend's home and goes to a hotel to read "Mrs Dalloway", and tries to kill herself. But she couldn't. After giving birth to her daughter, she leaves her family and follows her inner craving.
Clarissa and Richard loved each other in their youth. Richard called her 'Mrs Dalloway'. However, he chose a man, and Clarissa comes to live with Sally of the same sex. Richard becomes a prominent writer and wins a honored prize. But he is dying of AIDS. Clarissa is planning to have a party for him in the evening, but he commits suicide by jumping out of a window like Septimus in Woolf's book.
That night, Laura visits Clarissa and the two stories become one.
The two things, for example, one is social norms or superficial behaviors and the other is true craving in the back of one's mind, might sometimes conflict in one's mind. You might hurt your lover, your family or other people to live truthfully with yourself. This was a wonderful movie that I thought such a thing.
It's interesting that many names in Woolf's book appeared with different roles in this movie. And the Woolf's story in this movie is also moving.
On the other hand, it provides a feeling of strangeness for me that most characters in this movie are gays. Anyway, I think it's better to read Woolf's "Mrs Dalloway" and Michael Cunningham's "The Hours" before an appreciation of this movie.
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