Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore bring dignity and Oscar-worthy performances to "The Hours," a lovingly crafted meditation on death, loss and literature.

By Andrew O'Hehir

Dec 27, 2002 | Comparing a movie to a musical composition is one of those commonplaces of upper-middle film criticism that's almost never true. "The Hours" is the exception that proves the rule. Director Stephen Daldry (of "Billy Elliot") and screenwriter David Hare (an esteemed English playwright) have done what seemed impossible, rendering Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, a meditative exercise in which not much happens, into a meticulously constructed and richly rewarding film that dissolves the boundaries of time and narrative. Cunningham's book and Daldry's film are musical in the sense that each is essentially an exercise in counterpoint, a theme and variations based on Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway," which attempts to distill a woman's entire life into the events of a single day.

It's easy to be snotty about a movie like "The Hours," packed as it is with prestigious actors, tastefully appointed interiors, multiple-Kleenex moments pitched toward female audiences and mild highbrow pretensions. (Anything below five Oscar nominations for the cast and filmmakers will probably be viewed as a disappointment.) I have reservations about the film here and there, but the level of its craftsmanship is magnificent and its appreciation of the drama, terror and tragedy of everyday life is exquisite. If the film's showpiece is Nicole Kidman, rendered unrecognizable by that prosthetic nose, giving an astonishing performance as Virginia Woolf, its emotional center is Meryl Streep as an American woman, circa 2001 -- jittery and frayed in the way so many of us are these days -- who must face an apparently ordinary day that will change her life.

Cunningham's idea, somewhere between loving tribute and brilliant deconstruction, was to fracture the one-day story of Woolf's novel between three different women widely separated in geography and time and explore the connections between them, some obvious and some not.

In 1923, in a London suburb, Woolf battles mental illness and makes a start on the book that will become "Mrs. Dalloway." In 1951, in a Los Angeles suburb, a housewife named Laura Brown (played in the film by Julianne Moore) reads "Mrs. Dalloway" and tries to confront her own deepening depression. In 2001, in New York, Clarissa Vaughn (Streep), whose closest friends jokingly call her Mrs. Dalloway, plans a party for Richard (Ed Harris), a writer she cares for who is dying of AIDS. (Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway is also named Clarissa and is also planning a party.)

Cunningham's novel (like Woolf's) incontestably shows a great talent at work, but I found it a bit too mannered and self-conscious, and perhaps too didactic as well, to fully enjoy it. What I mean by didactic, in this case, is that Cunningham's focus on his characters' indeterminate sexual preferences takes a legitimate and valuable insight -- that either/or categories like "gay" and "straight" are meaningless when it comes to the human heart -- and turns it into an unbending iron rule. This issue, and several others besides, is actually handled more gracefully by Daldry and Hare. Thanks largely to this remarkable cast, the sexual uncertainty of Virginia and Laura and Clarissa and Richard and everyone else in view seem like individual oddities in action, not like the expression of a general principle. It isn't so much that everybody's queer as that everybody's screwed up in his or her own infinitely specific way -- which is a general principle I can endorse.

Daldry's "The Hours" begins and ends with the same startling scene, which occurs on a fourth day, separated in space and time from the other three: Woolf's suicide in 1941, which she accomplished by wading into a river with stones in her coat pockets. (Attention, spoiler police: This happens in the first scene of the movie. Furthermore, in case you're still confused, Virginia Woolf was a real person and the circumstances of her death are not a secret.) As in a piece of music, the same phrase has acquired a different resonance the second time around. It no longer simply conveys a tragic and desperate act (although it remains so); it is also a moment of resolution, self-determination, even nobility. As another character says in circumstances I shouldn't divulge, life is always a question of "what you can bear." We simultaneously understand that Woolf was a maddening, egotistical genius and that by 1941 she could bear no more.

Movies can also do something that novels essentially can't (outside of the unreadable fringes of the avant-garde), which is to melt the boundaries between characters in different places and times. In its first few scenes, "The Hours" establishes that this trans-historical mosaic is to be its method. Virginia's alarm clock goes off in 1923 and she struggles to wake; Laura turns hers off in 1951 and stays in bed; Clarissa shuts off the electronic beeping and leaps up. In perhaps 30 seconds of screen time, we see all three women confronting their faces in the mirror, putting their hair up and beginning to face the day.

Although "The Hours" isn't exactly a barrel of laughs, this approach even creates occasional moments of comedy. A bit later in the morning, Virginia composes the first sentence of her novel: "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself." In the next moment, we are back in 2001 Manhattan, where Clarissa calls out to her girlfriend (Allison Janney): "Sally? I think I'll buy the flowers myself." (In Cunningham's book, by contrast, these transitions are private, literary moments: In one chapter, Virginia writes the sentence, and in the next, Laura reads it.)

As the day progresses, the correspondences between the three women grow more complicated, but so too do the differences between them. The point being made in both Cunningham's book and Hare's screenplay is not just that the patterns of women's lives tend to replicate themselves or that life often imitates art, but rather that there is endless variation amid that repetition and that no two lives and no two days, no matter how humdrum, are ever the same. This is a story of frustrated desire and mortality and loss, but also one in which each character finds something precious where they may not expect it. Sure, that's a formula. But it's not too dissimilar to the one on which human life on planet Earth is based.

Of course at the outset we know more about Virginia Woolf than about the other two women. We know she will write a book and we know she will eventually kill herself, leaving a prodigiously eloquent note for her long-suffering husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane, whose dignified performance should not go overlooked amid all the female wattage). None of this makes Kidman's acting here any less impressive; my companion commented that it's actually difficult to see Nicole Kidman in this movie's Virginia Woolf, and that's not just a matter of the fake nose.

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