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 t one point in "The Hours", Claire Danes'
character states to her depressed mother, "All of your friends are
sad," prompting me to think, "The reason, my dear, is because you're
in a Serious Art House movie!" Covered from end to end in misery,
depression, gay characters, hints at incest, literary symbolisms and motifs, "The
Hours" was made for a select group of people, and the rest of us need not
apply.
The film opens with the suicide of English novelist
Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman, in heavy prosthetic makeup), effectively
signaling that we're destined to sit through two hours of nonstop thrills and
chills and -- oh wait, I forgot, this is a Serious Art House Movie, and
as we all know, the first rule of a Serious Art House movie is that there can be
no happiness. I repeat: there can be no happiness whatsoever.
With that out of the way, "The Hours" uses nifty
scene transitions to shift between three different eras in order to follow three
different women as they struggle through a single day (the "hours" of
the title). There's the eternally depressed, morbid, and always on the verge of
suicide Woolf in the 1920s; there's Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a depressed,
morbid, and on the verge of suicide housewife in the 50s; and Clarissa (Meryl
Streep), a depressed lesbian caring for her depressed, morbid, and on the verge
of suicide brother in 2001 New York. Are you starting to see a pattern here?
It should be obvious by now that I approach movies like
"The Hours" and its ilk the way I approach my trip to the dentist's
chair -- I try to make it as quick and as painless as possible. I do this for
the simple reason that movies like "The Hours" was not made for me, a
person who doesn't think movies should give me ideas about the many ways to off
myself. "The Hours" was made to win awards from film critics with
delusions of pretension and self-important New York artists who think throwing
fecal matter on a canvas is "great art." It's a limited audience to be
sure, unless one takes "The Hours" to be an example of the real world,
in which case everyone is gay, secretly wants to screw their siblings, and are on the verge of suicide because they're "deep
thinkers" and have already realized, unlike us sheep, that life is
meaningless.
Screenwriter David Hare and director Stephen Daldry
essentially uses the lives of Laura and Clarissa to act out Woolf's most famous
novel, "Mrs. Dalloway." If you've never read the novel, don't worry,
because neither has most of the world. (That thing about us not being "deep
thinkers" again; and even if we did read it, the novel would be too
"hard" of a read for us to "get through" anyways.) The movie
makes it clear what it's trying to do, and in fact the only worry I had was that
the film might stumble on its own perceived cleverness and fall flat on its
face.
The acting by the three female leads is quite good. The
presence of indie
favorites Streep and Moore weren't a surprise; the two women give their usual
good Serious Art House movie performances, and I didn't expect anything less
from them. Nicole Kidman, on the other hand, was a spectacular surprise. The glamour is
gone, replaced by a prosthetic nose and God knows what else. She's almost
unrecognizable, and her so-depressed-she-makes-me-want-to-off-myself
Virginia Woolf is a revelation.
"The Hours" wasn't made for the public, but
rather for a small group of people obsessed with patting themselves on the back.
I speak, of course, about the Academy Awards and the other 200 or so award shows
that come out in any given year. Miramax will release "The Hours" as
their prestige film, the one movie they're willing to lose money on just so they
can claim its title on their list of credits, thus reaffirming to their peers
that they're serious about art and not that whole business thing.
Beyond those points, it's still a very good movie with fine
direction and a stellar cast. Even if you find movies like this to be as
entertaining as slitting your own wrists (as I do), one can't deny its good
elements.
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