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The Hours
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Peter Bradshaw
Fri 14 Feb 2003 02.26 CET
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Amelancholy 1920s English novelist is crucified with fear of encroaching

madness. A depressed housewife in 1940s Los Angeles, unable to bake cakes
or look after children properly, is paralysed with secret horror that she's not
a real homemaker. An editor in modern-day Manhattan is caring for a
distinguished writer dying from Aids, oppressed by pseudo-wifely self-
denial and the knowledge that any feelings he had for her were despatched
long ago by turning their affair into material for a novel. Three women,
three lives, three imprisoned, solitary souls in the same cell block.

This is the movie-triptych that director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter

David Hare have assembled, taken from Michael Cunningham's novel, and
its constituent, handsomely mounted panels are inhabited by three earnest,
meticulous performances.

Nicole Kidman plays Virginia Woolf, working on the first draft of Mrs
Dalloway, the stream-of-consciousness work of 1925, about the society
hostess whose air of omnicompetence conceals inner turmoil. Julianne
Moore is the housewife Laura Brown, inspired by her bedside copy of Mrs
Dalloway to attempt a terrible escape, but loyally showing her husband Dan
(John C Reilly) a cheerful, smiling face which becomes set in a rictus of
despair. Finally, there is Meryl Streep as Clarissa, neglecting her partner
Sally (Allison Janney) for the torch she still holds for prizewinning literary
star Richard Brown (Ed Harris), organising a celebratory dinner for him -
the fate of which is to echo the denouement of Woolf's novel.

It is a daring act of extrapolation, and a real departure from most movie-

making, which can handle only one universe at a time. Oddly, the
comparisons that popped into my head were Noel Coward's Cavalcade or
This Happy Breed, with their episodic stories of reticent, clenched courage
and pain. Virginia Woolf is somehow supposed to be the grandmotherly
ancestor both of women's agony and the means to cure it. But by
intercutting between them, Daldry more or less persuades us that the three
women's stories are atemporal, that they exist alongside each other not in
sequence but in parallel.

So Virginia, Laura and Clarissa demonstrate a metempsychosis, a

transmigration of souls; the languor of their private breakdowns are cousins
to each other. Little touches recur like resonant musical themes. All three
are shown breaking eggs against mixing bowls: a tender image of nurturing
and motherhood. Virginia's very eccentric, shapeless dress in 1920 contains
the DNA that weaves Laura's pinafore in 1945 and Clarissa's housecoat in
2001.

Whether or not any of this constitutes a feminist argument is tricky. It is a

vantage point from which it looks disappointingly as if precisely nothing has
been achieved for women's happiness over 80 years, other than to transfer
some of the victimhood prerogative to a gay man. But the movie is still a
compassionate scrutiny of the quiet desperation in many women's lives, and
the act of writing serves as a way of understanding how Laura, Clarissa and
Virginia reconcile their real worlds with the alternative, secret existences
they imagine for themselves.

"I believe I may have a first sentence," mutters Virginia, stupefied by the
possibilities of fiction - possibilities that do not scare her stolid, supportive
and thoroughly exasperated husband Leonard (Stephen Dillane). When she
is not at her desk, nervy Virginia is being beastly to the staff, ordering her
mutinous cook to make a train journey all the way from Richmond to the
centre of town to get some sugar-ginger for lunch. "You're not still
frightened of the servants?" asks Vanessa Bell (Miranda Richardson) acidly
- and here is an aspect of middle-class women's lives that has no obvious
equivalent in the more democratic eras of 1945 and 2001.

Clarissa is to be fiction's handmaiden in both the personal and professional

sense: an editor who, though she might not herself have worked on
Richard's manuscripts, supplied the inspiration for his novel with their love
affair and cannot decide if its appearance in his fiction is an exaltation or a
betrayal. Sandwiched between them is Julianne Moore's Laura: not a writer
but a reader, someone who feels the liberating possibilities of literature
more keenly than either of them.

The performances that Daldry elicits from them are all strong: tightly
managed, smoothly and dashingly juxtaposed under a plangent score. I
have to confess I am agnostic about Nicole Kidman, who as Woolf murmurs
her lines through an absurd prosthetic nose. It's almost a Hollywood
Disability. You've heard of Daniel Day-Lewis and My Left Foot. This is
Nicole and her Big Fake Schnoz. It doesn't look anything like the real
Virginia's sharp, fastidious features. Hollywood is a little in love right now
with literary Dead White Females, adoring them not for their books but
their tragic diseases. (We've had Kate Winslet as Iris Murdoch; soon it's
going to be Gwyneth Paltrow as - gulp! - Sylvia Plath.) There's a stifling
piety about it, which is why this movie so often looks like an ever-so-classy
bid for awards.

Julianne Moore gives another tight-violin-string portrayal of a terrified soul

with a flash of panic behind the eyes. It is superbly controlled, humane
performance - though destined to be measured against her similar, but
incomparably more powerful and developed presence in Todd Haynes's Far
From Heaven. Streep's performance is probably the most fully realised of
the three: a return to the kind of mature and demanding role on which she
had a freehold in yesterday's Hollywood. Harassed, distracted, tormented
with a passion masquerading as compassion, she is sickeningly aware that
her own life has dribbled through her fingers.

My other reservation is with a final narrative flourish that unites the second
and third strands of the movie. This undoubtedly makes the story shut with
a satisfying click, but to my mind it's an aesthetic error. Yoking them
together disturbs the fine tripartite balance of Daldry's composition, and is
actually a failure of nerve. Part of the bracing experimental impact of the
film was the absence of narrative connection between the three women.
Supplying one in the final reel undermines its formal daring, but certainly
packs an emotional punch. It makes for an elegant and poignant chamber
music of the soul.