THE HOURS
Valley of the Shadow
Like other post-World War I modernists, Virginia Woolf believed that the debacle had shattered the comfortable conventions of Edwardian society, and rendered its art hopelessly outmoded. Meaning needed to be salvaged from the ruins; radically new aesthetic vocabularies had to be forged. Towards these ends Woolf reimagined the English novel in her 1925 masterpiece, Mrs Dalloway. For her central theme she took 'the cotton wool of everyday life', the "suchness" of the ordinary so prized by mystics East and West, from which she would recuperate an ineffable grace.
Woolf's heroine is Clarissa Dalloway: a witty, thoughtful but not hugely intellectual London woman of middle age and wealthy background; well married to a supportive, not greatly imaginative government official. The narrative encompasses one bustling day in which Mrs. Dalloway plans and gives a party. During this utterly unremarkable twenty-four hours, Woolf not only unfolds Mrs. Dalloway's entire life; the author's disarmingly simple prose seems to capture the quintessence of life itself.
As Mrs. Dalloway strolls through a radiant London springtime, she also traverses the valley of the shadow. Insinuations of mortality are never far from her civilized pleasures. She's recently recovered from a serious illness. Men maimed in body and mind stumble through the streets. Her alter ego is Warren Septimus Smith, a clerk driven mad by soldiering in the Great War's charnel trenches, who flings himself from his window rather than submit to humiliating incarceration.
The two never meet, but hearing Smith's smug psychiatrist mention the suicide at her soiree that evening spurs the novel's transcendental ending. Standing alone at a window, Clarissa is suddenly flooded with a serene certainty about the "rightness" of her choices throughout the years. She intuits that her absolute aliveness to this very moment articulates mysteriously with Smith's right to end his being. Touched by a strange joy, she rejoins her guests.
Michael Cunningham's much praised 1998 novel, The Hours anatomized a single "Dalloway-ish" day in the lives of three women of different times and locales -- including Woolf herself. Cunningham's rather labored homage has now been refashioned into a movie more skilful than its source (a rare feat in screen adaptation). Beyond admirably reprising Mrs. Dalloway's themes and formal devices, Steven Daldry's The Hours honors the courage of those -- like Woolf -- who battle against devastating affective illness, and commends the devotion of the harried 'watchers' who care for them. The film's unheralded clinical accuracy on both scores puts the humbug diagnostics of A Beautiful Mind to shame.
The Hours begins with Woolf's suicide by drowning in 1941. The establishing sequence is all the more wrenching for its cool objectivity, the 'suchness' of her death embodied by the sturdy sensible shoe which drops from a trailing foot as her body is swept away by the swift current. The action shifts to Woolf (Nicole Kidman, who eschews her glamor to capture Woolf's prim but ferocious intensity) awakening on a quiet morning in her spacious Richmond house two decades earlier. She's beaten back several episodes of near-fatal psychotic (probably bipolar) depression for which doctors have prescribed removal from her frenetic London world to genteel suburban surroundings. Her fragile health is guarded by her husband, Leonard. His vigilant apprehensiveness is matched by his wife's frustration about a rest cure which has grown intolerably worse than her disease.
Shift to a sundrenched post-World War II Los Angeles suburban street lined with tickytack ranch houses. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), pregnant with her second child, awakens to yet another morning in which she must paint a happy face over the agonizing melancholy she dare not reveal to her stolid, utterly unknowing war-hero husband or her small son. But the boy perceives the torment his mother is ashamed to name. He's consumed by love for her; after the fashion of children of depression, he's attuned to the minutest alteration in her precarious stability.
The Hours' third heroine is Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a lesbian editor in contemporary New York, awakening as her long time lover slips between the sheets. Today she's planning a party for Richard (Ed Harris), a gay poet recently awarded a major prize for his work. After a brief summer affair in their youth, he became Clarissa's dearest friend, acerb critic, nearby neighbor, -- then her patient when he was incapacitated by AIDS. Encephalophy has leached away his artistic voice, but cruelly left him sufficient awareness to grasp its loss.
As The Hours unfolds, Mrs. Dalloway's motifs reverberate throughout each woman's life, uncannily uniting them across the years (the film's copious references to every aspect of the novel could generate a graduate thesis). During her day Woolf will conceive Mrs. Dalloway, realize through its conception she must return to London to reclaim her identity, even at peril of relapse. Reading Mrs. Dalloway saves Laura Brown's life by granting her ego distance from, if not profound insight into her torment (including her repressed homoeroticism). Richard's pet name for Clarissa Vaughn is "Mrs Dalloway". It's a mixed complement; emblematizing Clarissa's optimism, as well as a lack of seriousness he's often scathingly critiqued.
"What a lark! What a plunge!" Mrs. Dalloway exclaims as she steps over her threshold. The film underscores Woolf's keen appreciation of the ever renewable delight in the small miracles of the physical world, like the steaming cup of coffee Laura offers her ill neighbor, Kitty. Mrs. Dalloway's celebration of gratuitous moments of connection is incarnated by Leonard's touching concern that his wife eat a nourishing lunch; Laura's teaching her son how to sift flour for a birthday cake.
The Hours also trebles Mrs. Dalloway's delicate balance of its protagonists between eros and thanatos, as on a razor's edge. Affirmations of life and love are everywhere equilibrated with poignant recognitions of mortality and loss; notably, of that desolating despair which may compel its victims to elect death over life.
Woolf's depression and attendant isolation encompass her valley of the shadow. She achieves mastery by taking up Mrs. Dalloway and renouncing her exile. Laura Brown doesn't lack the courage to kill herself: indeed death would come as a blessing from her "darkness visible". But it would also kill her unborn child; savage the son she clearly loves more than her husband.
In a ravishing coup de cinema, The Hours hurtles across time to reveal that Laura's doting Richie is in fact Clarissa Vaughan's dying poet. Spared his mother's suicide, Richard was nevertheless scarred by Laura's flight after his sister was born. One theorizes that Laura, in the vise of major depression, deemed killing herself inevitable; believed she could save Richard and the family greater pain by abondining them.
Clarissa Vaughan inherits both Richard's devotion to his adored mother and his rage over her desertion. His suicide just before her party reprises Smith's fatal plunge in Mrs. Dalloway. Richard's overdetermined act terminates his invalid death-in-life; relieves Clarissa of her anguished "watching"; and exacts a proxy revenge for Laura's perceived betrayal.
The Hours' narrative circle closes upon exquisite echoes of Mrs. Dalloway's luminous conclusion, summoning up the novel's invocation of an uncanny symmetry between creation and uncreation. Laura Brown has been called by Clarissa to Richard's extemporary wake admist the ruins of her party. Age has burned away Laura's depression. Her extraordinary sweetness of spirit shines forth as she explains with a few lucid words why left her family, and she's embraced warmly by Clarissa's daughter. Cut finally to Woolf's watery death: as her voiceover speaks eloquently of 'the hours...the hours' loving her husband and the world, even as she avows the validity of ending her suffering -- and his: 'to look life in the face...and then to put it away..."
Mrs. Dalloway's narrative structure is extraordinarily complex, flickering between past and present tenses. Omniscient third person narration alternates with the often fragmentary perspectives of major and minor characters. David Hare's screenplay exquisitely replicates the novel's astonishing mobility. The film contains no dissolves. Jump cuts between and within different times and places provide striking visual analogies to Woolf's continuous shifts between multiple streams of consciousness. The camera's supple suturing is enhanced by Philip Glass' insistent pulsing score.
Of the many examples of superb acting, I only cite Laura/Moore's heartrending wail as, peering into a mirror, she beholds her carefully tended facade shattering into a raw revelation of her fractured spirit. Here and elsewhere in this very great film, I was moved to recall Othello's plaintive cry, through which Shakespeare intimates an existential grief transcending the Moor's particular despair: "Oh, the pity of it...the pity of it..."