I saw The Hours on first release and watched it again last night for the first time in several years. The same things I loved about it the first time have not changed -- its intelligence, its flow, the marvelous performances and the fact that there was no sledgehammer in the script or director Stephen Daltry's hand to ruthlessly drive home the reasons why the three women are where they are now. This truly is the kind of movie that either grabs you and leaves you breathless, or befuddles you and leaves you cold.
The task of film editing, which is an essential part of a movie that weaves several strands together, is one that Peter Boyle (not the actor) fulfills brilliantly. He was nominated for his work here, but lost the Oscar to Martin Walsh (Chicago). Boyle bravely uses cuts that are sometimes only a frame or two. It is his substantial contribution that draws the distinction between the similar events in the lives of these women over one day in each of their lives, and how they handle them.
There is plenty of character development. During the birthday dinner for Laura's husband, he describes to their son what his mother was like when they first met, in high school. She was strange, he says, and always alone. Even though he is a meat-and-potatoes kind of guy he was drawn to her, fell in love with her, and still loves her, although he is unable to reach her. He masks her depression for Richie, explaining she needs her rest, and that becoming a big brother is an important job... it's not just 1950s housewife angst that's driving Laura to despair... she has always been lost. When Kitty jumps up to see what book Laura is reading, (Wolff's Mrs. Dalloway), of course, Laura tries to explain the novel's plot and Kitty's eyes glaze over. She doesn't get what would draw her friend into a book like that.
Laura wants to escape, and eventually does off camera, obviously causing a lot of irredeemable pain and suffering to the family she leaves behind. She "chose life," as she says, but selfishly, and at a tremendous cost. But this is what those suffering from major depression often do: the isolation, fear and bewilderment at their inability to connect with other people drives them to alleviate their own pain in one way or another. It isn't that they don't care about those who love them, but that their own pain is insurmountable, and they will either fight for their sanity, or surrender to the fear that they've lost it. Laura tries both, but ultimately her choice to live life on her own terms leaves a void in her family that is as deep as if she had had to be carried out of that hotel room on a stretcher, a sheet covering her wet and lifeless body.
It isn't essential to have read anything by or about Virginia Wolff to understand her character. Her depression, hospitalizations, hearing voices and attempting suicide are all alluded to her by her husband, her sister, her cook and Virginia herself. She, too, wants to escape -- "I'm dying in this town." But she will take her problems with her. Her husband Leonard is filled with longing to have his wife be the person she was before she went mad, and is relentless in his pursuit to help her recover. He will go to whatever lengths necessary, and his devotion to her is deep and powerful, but in the end, it isn't enough for Virginia who begs him in her suicide note not to blame himself. Of course he will. In order to achieve acceptance of the loss of a loved one to suicide, those left behind have to come to the realization that they will never understand all the reasons why their loved one chose to leave them in this way. Frankly, I don't know enough about Leonard Wolff to know if he ever did reach that plane.
Clarissa most successfully conceals her fears from others, but her daughter points out that all her mother's friends are sad, and Richard's death brings about in Clarissa the sense that she is sad, too, and has been that way for a long time. She spends all her spare time attempting to create happy experiences for others, perhaps hoping that she will again find that sense of "possibility;" that idea that she has achieved perfection. Only Richard has brought her to that place, but that was a long, long time ago. He gave her that sense of possibility; the contentment and ability to see every day as a promise, and eventually he takes it away from her, in the cruelest of ways.
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