The Hours (movie)

The Hours is a serious drama based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel of the same name, itself inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. The film opens with Woolf walking to the river in 1941, where she drowns herself.

In 1923, Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is writing Mrs Dalloway while struggling with severe mental illness. In 1951 Los Angeles, a young housewife, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), is reading Woolf’s novel and wrestling with the suffocating expectations of being a perfect wife and mother. In 2001 New York, Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) is preparing a party for her dear friend Richard, a poet who is dying of AIDS. The film weaves these three women’s lives together with remarkable sophistication.

Laura tries to perform the role of the ideal wife and mother, yet she senses another self hidden beneath the surface. One day she leaves her son with a friend, checks into a hotel with Mrs Dalloway, and attempts suicide—but cannot go through with it. After giving birth to her daughter, she ultimately leaves her family to follow the life she feels compelled to live.

Clarissa and Richard were once in love. He used to call her “Mrs Dalloway.” But Richard eventually chose a male partner, and Clarissa built a life with Sally, a woman she loves deeply. Richard becomes a celebrated writer and wins a major literary prize, but as his illness worsens, he grows increasingly fragile. On the day of the party Clarissa is planning for him, he takes his own life by jumping from a window—an echo of Septimus in Woolf’s novel.

That night, Laura visits Clarissa, and the film’s separate threads finally converge.

The story explores the tension between outward social roles and the private desires that live beneath them. To live truthfully, one may wound lovers, family members, or others—and the film confronts this painful truth with honesty and beauty. I found it a deeply moving work.

It is also fascinating how many names and motifs from Mrs Dalloway reappear in new forms throughout the film. The scenes depicting Woolf’s own life are especially affecting.

At the same time, I felt a certain strangeness in the fact that many of the characters in the film are gay. In any case, I think the film is best appreciated after reading both Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Cunningham’s The Hours.

 

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