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Lesbians. It may be small-minded or even a male thing, but that word is the most dominate aspect of this film for me. Not only was it not the erotic lesbian fantasies that I tend to enjoy (and what straight guy doesn’t), but it was completely unexpected on my part. I guess I should have read a biography on Virginia Woolf before venturing to the theater for this one. As to the story, I can sum it up rather quickly (if not simplistically) in that the film follows three women from three different time periods and explores how being a lesbian effected their lives. That is of course the rough outline with much more filling given for each woman. First there is the writer Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman, Birthday Girl) who is living in England in the Twenties with her husband where she is extremely unhappy in her life, so unhappy that she eventually commits suicide (I’m not giving anything away here since they start with her drowning, and it is part of the historical record). But before she offs herself, she writes the novel Mrs. Dalloway. The second woman, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore, Evolution), is living in 1950s America with her husband Dan (John C. Reilly, Chicago) and son Richard (Jack Rovello). She too is very unhappy as she must conform to the norms of society and pretend to be heterosexual by getting married and raising a family while trying to suppress her carnal desires. Laura is connected to Virginia because she is reading Mrs. Dalloway, something I should probably do as well to get a deeper understanding of this film. The third and final woman is Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep, AI), an out-of-the-closet lesbian who lives with her partner Sally Lester (Allison Janney, Nurse Betty) in present day New York. Though Clarissa is liberated, she was not always that way, which causes much of her unhappiness. Her connection is that she had her daughter Julia (Claire Danes, Igby Goes Down) with Laura’s grown-up son Richard (Ed Harris, A Beautiful Mind), who has plenty of his own issues, and apparently is gay too. Richard’s issues stem from scars created by his mother, and probably from his own suppression of his homosexuality at an early age. So a more detailed analysis is that The Hours is a window into how society’s changing social mores (in this case the stigma surrounding homosexuality) affects people’s lives over time. The screenplay for this movie was written by David Hare, who based it on the novel of the same name by Michael Cunningham. Some others to note in this film are Miranda Richardson, Stephen Dillane, Toni Collette, Jeff Daniels, and Margo Martindale. First of all, this really isn’t my type of movie since there was an utter dearth of humor (in fact the film is somewhat depressing). However, director Stephen Daldry does an excellent job with the film, and all three of the main actresses (Kidman, Moore, and Streep) do fantastic jobs with their roles. But again, I could not really get into the movie, so I can only give it six couches out of ten. Call me small-minded if you will, but at least I’m honest. Later.
Last updated: Thursday, March 20, 2008 02:48:02 AM Click Here to get back into frames.
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