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THE HOURS
Stars: Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, John C. Reilly, Ed Harris
Rated: PG-13
Score: 8/10 |
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Golden Globe Winner
Best Picture, Best Actress |
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Performance-wise, this is one of the better films this year. Nicole Kidman steps out of her shoes, and out of her nose, into the role of Virginia Woolf. There's moments when you don't even realize who you are watching. Meryl streep is a current day book editor. Julianne Moore is a typical suburban housewife in the 50's. Over three era's, these women's lives are followed in the course of a day. Woolf writes the story of Mrs. Dallaway, Moore reads it, and Streep is seemingly living out the story. |
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Virginia Woolf is a writer considered to be insane. She lives with her husband who is devoted, but she feels smothered by mundane isolation that is her life. One day she begins to write the story of Mrs. Dalloway, whose life will change in the course of a day. |
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Julianne Moore is a housewife living in the 50's who is disconnected - going through the motions of a perfect life while feeling displaced from it. She finds no joy, and through reading Mrs. Dalloway begins to discover things about herself. The cake she bakes this morning a symbol of sorts - she tells her son that Daddy won't know they love him unless they bake the cake. But the cake doesn't come out good at all, and her neighbor explains that's anyone can bake a cake. |
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Even if you have all the right ingredients, it doesn't always turn out the way it should. She feels that way about her life, and about love, that no matter how much she pretends she just is not capable. And she is torn between finding her own happiness or sacrificing it for the sake of others. |
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Streep is a woman who seems to have it together, but her life revolves around the parties she throws for people in elaborate detail. Today she is giving a party for a friend and once lover for receiving the most prestigious award a Poet can. He is ill however, and dying of AIDS. But she pretends as if things will never come to an end. Ed Harris gives a memorable performance, where in one scene he explains that he feels he's only been holding on to life for her...to keep her together. She feels it is her duty to be the one who has it all together, that she can make anything wonderful by throwing a party, but she pretends. Always pretending to be happy when she is covering up for the very fact that inside she is unravelling. |
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All three women seem to have one thing in common. They are tied to their lives by guilt and obligations, and expectations. While in thought of taking a train away from her life and her husband she explains to him, "I am ungrateful? You call ME ungrateful? My life has been stolen from me. I'm living in a town I have no wish to live in... I'm living a life I have no wish to live.... How did this happen?"
Moore lives in an era of the 50's when many remember how wives were expected to be, before women of the 60's later declared liberation from these type of social restrictions. She is drowning in her life, a metaphor quite clearly lived out by the later suicide of Woolf. And even in modern days women have created an image of independence where they are expected to do it all and be every woman, but we too can build our own walls around our life that ultimately isolate us from happiness as we struggle so hard to please others. In the end their lives come to an unusual and suprising intersection. There are many things this movie gives you to think about regarding life, and death. Those who want to die but are guilted to live for anothers sake. Those who avoid life in hopes of attaining peace and happiness. There are moments they are truly saddened by others who are faced with death that truly love their life, as if the cosmic fates are playing out some cruel joke by making the unhappy forced to grapple with the hours upon hours they are forced to endure their own.
"This is my right; it is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs, but the violent jolt of the Capital, that is my choice. The meanest patient, yes, even the very lowest is allowed some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. I wish, for your sake, Leonard, I could be happy in this quietness" |
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