The Hours

From the opening scene, we know that what we are watching is going to be a psychological drama about depression, anxiety, and the relationships that shape lives. We see a woman, author Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), place rocks in her pockets and drown herself in the fast-moving water of a river. This is narrated by her final letter to her husband, where she expresses her love for him and that they couldn’t have been happier together. Woolf’s suicide is, of course, a well-documented event, as is her letter. We will spend the next two hours exploring some of what led her to this end.

But that is not all of what we will be exploring in The Hours. The story is one told of three women, separated by time yet tied together nevertheless. The first is, of course, Virginia Woolf, whose struggles with her health and feelings of entrapment imposed on her by her husband and their doctor, whose insistence that she leave London for her health has left her frustrated and depressed. She has begun writing her book, Mrs. Dalloway, in 1927, but the writing is going slowly, and she feels like she is constantly under the eye of her husband, Leonard (Stephen Dillane). Leonard is doing his best to look after her, but he lives in constant fear that she will take her own life, something that she eventually does in 1941.

In 1951, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is a troubled Los Angeles housewife, pregnant with her second child with husband Dan (John C. Reilly). Her life looks ideal on the outside with a loving husband and young son, Richie, but inward she is deeply unhappy. When a neighbor, Kitty (Toni Collette), stops by, needing a favor and a shoulder to cry on, Laura boldly kisses her on the lips. Kitty accepts the kiss, even responds to it for a moment, but doesn’t comment on it, with both women ignoring any hidden meaning it might have. Later, Laura leaves her son with a friend and checks into a hotel room, intending to commit suicide. She falls asleep while reading Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, and when she awakens, has a change of heart. 

In 2001, New Yorker Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) spends her day preparing for a party she is hosting to honor her friend Richard (Ed Harris), Laura’s now grown son. Richard is a poet and author who is living with AIDS and is about to receive a career achievement award but has grown bitter and depressed, partly because as a child his mother abandoned the family, leaving him and his newborn sibling behind. Although Clarissa is a lesbian and in a long-term relationship with her partner Sally Lester (Allison Janney), she and Richard were once lovers. Richard doesn’t want to attend the party, viewing the whole thing as meaningless because he didn’t get the award until he was on the brink of death. He refers to Clarissa as Mrs. Dalloway, an inside joke the two have.

And so it goes. Three separate stories of very different people struggling with depression and finding meaning in lives that have been cruel and limiting. Three different timelines with three suicide attempts, two that are ultimately successful. The novel Mrs. Dalloway takes place in a day during which a woman buys flowers and prepares for a party. This book ties into all three of the stories as we see Virginia Woolf writing it, Laura reading it, and Clarissa essentially living it, even saying one of the book’s famous lines. All three stories end in sadness, too. While two of the characters from the second story appear in the third, they do not flow together like you think they would. Instead, the connection almost doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things other than to add some emotional cohesion and to better understand Richard’s past and his present emotional state. 

The choice not to have the three stories parallel each other goes back to the original novel by Michael Cunningham. While Mrs. Dalloway serves as the bridging element, there is also a sense of another Virginia Woolf classic, A Room With a View, a novel that is considered by many to have initiated in some ways modern feminism. Women, to her viewpoint, didn’t have rooms of their own but shared them with the men in their lives, on call to their husbands, fathers, and families. This is how Laura feels in 1951 as she feels apart from her loving husband and child. He dotes on her but she doesn’t love him in return and feels trapped inside that house and that relationship. Her encounter with Kitty suggests that she would have been happier in a lesbian relationship but, this being the 1950s, would have found herself persecuted for pursuing such. 

That is not the case for Clarissa, who, living in 2001, faces no such judgment or persecution. But though personal freedoms expanded over the years, guilt and emotion are still governing factors in people’s lives. Suicide also comes in many forms and for many different reasons, too. Virginia Woolf was bisexual, though the film barely touches on that, relegating it to a scene that mimics the one between Laura and Kitty. There are times when it seems like this film is trying to make direct comparisons to Mrs. Dalloway, but it isn’t a perfect fit and would require a full thesis paper to dig deep enough to make all the connections. For the average moviegoer, those connections just aren’t there beyond the shallow end.

Lives without love are devastating lives. We see this in Richard, whose life is perhaps the most tragic of all the male characters. We learn that he has his mother’s contact information, something he acquired at some point after she left, but has made little effort to contact her. He blames her for abandoning him as a child and has never gotten over that feeling of betrayal. He has written her out as having died, a plot point he put into his novel that Laura read and, while hurt by it, understands it, too. We can only imagine the different trajectories their lives would have taken had she not left. She chose to live and, in return, he chooses to die. 

This feels like an adaptation of a stage play. Surprisingly, it isn’t, though it was later adapted to the stage nearly twenty years later. The way it is written, the way it is set up, and the themes, which while dark and disturbing, lend themselves well to the intimacy of a live performance. It just speaks to what makes us all humans, fallible and weak as we are, and having that intimacy on the stage would be elevating, emotional, and raw.

That can be felt on screen, too, thanks to the immense talents of some very strong performers, especially Moore and Harris. Both are given characters that are inherently unlikable, yet we pity them. By her own admission, Laura has done the worst thing a mother can do in abandoning her family. We are not asked to forgive her for this act, nor are we to empathize with her. But we are tasked with understanding her and pitying her somewhat. She is drowning in her own depression, visualized by the striking imagery of a flood coming out from underneath a hotel bedroom as she prepares to end her own life. 

Likewise, as Richard, ravaged by AIDS and his own personal demons, sits in an open window preparing to end his own life, we understand his reasonings. It’s easy to be there on the outside looking in and saying suicide is never the answer. But that mindset is coming from a perspective not shrouded in despair. Until we have been pushed to that point ourselves and overcome it, we cannot possibly comprehend it on that level.

The Hours is a moving picture that brought on an emotional response at several moments throughout my watch this morning. I had seen it before and remembered being moved by it when it was new, but this latest watch affected me more deeply than I expected. Age and experience have a tendency to do that. So does looking back on my own life and remembering times when I was low and depressed, thinking dark thoughts. Thankfully, I have a support system in my life to lift me out of those dark times and help me move on. Not everyone does. But, as Richard puts it, “I still have to face the hours, don’t I? I, mean, the hours after the party, and the hours after that…”

Academy Award Nominations:

Best Picture: Scott Rudin and Robert Fox

Best Director: Stephen Daldry

Best Actress: Nicole Kidman (won)

Best Supporting Actor: Ed Harris

Best Supporting Actress: Julianne Moore

Best Adapted Screenplay: David Hare

Best Costume Design: Ann Roth

Best Film Editing: Peter Boyle

Best Original Score: Philip Glass

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Release Date: December 25, 2002

Running Time: 114 Minutes

Rated PG-13

Starring: Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, Ed Harris, Toni Collette, Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Stephen Dillane, Allison Janney, John C. Reilly, and Miranda Richardson

Directed by: Stephen Daldry