Stephen Daldry (2002)

Beetroot three ways, cauliflower three ways – you often hear that kind of thing on television cooking shows like Masterchef.  Michael Cunningham’s 1999 novel The Hours is Mrs Dalloway three ways.  The non-linear narrative moves to and fro, across three different decades and places, each with their own protagonist.  In 1923 Virginia Woolf, living in Richmond (Surrey), is in the throes of writing her famous novel.  In 1949 Laura Brown, a Los Angeles housewife, is reading it.  In 1999, Clarissa Vaughan, an editor for a New York publishing house, is, like Clarissa Dalloway, preparing to host a party.  The timeframe for each narrative strand, also as in Mrs Dalloway, is a single day.  When I read The Hours in 2002 it struck me as an academic exercise, despite Cunningham’s cleverness.  When, a few months later, I first saw Stephen Daldry’s film of the book, it seemed an improvement on the original – to have more of a life of its own.  Twenty-plus years on, it’s less easy to assess the film by way of comparison with its source material, for this viewer anyway.  I haven’t reread the book and have forgotten things about it:  the cinema version, more than before, has to stand on its own two feet.  There’s still plenty to admire in it, much of the acting in particular, yet The Hours on screen is also in some ways ridiculous.

Daldry and David Hare, who wrote the screenplay, are very faithful to the novel, subject to a couple of minor adjustments to the settings and a rather more significant change to the structure.  In the film the American parts of the triptych are happening in 1951 and 2001, instead of 1949 and 1999 respectively:  it seems this is simply a matter of making the NYC set-up present day and the LA one fifty years earlier.  Like the novel, the film opens with Virginia Woolf’s death in 1941, when she drowned herself in a Sussex river, and quotes verbatim, in voiceover, the suicide note she addressed to her husband, Leonard.  The film closes with another shot of Virginia disappearing under the water, accompanied by a voiceover postscript to the suicide note, concluding with the words, ‘Leonard, always the years between us, always the love, always the hours’.  Although the drowning sequences bookend the film, the last sequence isn’t Cunningham’s book’s end but Hare’s addition.  It could be seen as a final acknowledgement (as if that were needed!) of the fundamental debt to Mrs Dalloway, which had the ‘The Hours’ as a working title.  It also has the effect of underlining the salience of mortality in the story.

In Richmond, Virginia (Nicole Kidman) and Leonard (Stephen Dillane) receive a visit from Virginia’s sister, Vanessa Bell (Miranda Richardson), and her three children.  The children discover a dead bird in the garden; Virginia and her little niece Angelica (Sophie Wyburd) conduct a funeral for the creature, after which Virginia lies down beside and stares at the bird.  Resuming work on her novel, she tells Leonard that she had intended to kill her heroine but has now decided another character should die instead.  In Los Angeles, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), expecting her second child but already struggling with motherhood and other aspects of a domestic life that is comfortable but, for Laura, oppressive, checks into a hotel room, where she plans to take a fatal overdose of pills.  Before doing so, she falls asleep; she dreams the hotel room is flooded and she is drowning. Laura wakes in alarm, changes her mind about killing herself, and returns to her son and husband.  In New York City, the party to be hosted by Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) is in honour of her long-time friend and one-time lover, Richard (Ed Harris), a writer with AIDS.  The party is to follow a ceremony at which Richard will receive a prestigious poetry award.  Neither ceremony nor party happens:  an hour or so beforehand, Richard, holed up in his upper-floor studio apartment, exits life through an open window.

The mortality pattern certainly chimes with Mrs Dalloway, in which the title character, ‘walking towards Bond Street’, asks herself ‘did it matter that she must inevitably cease completely?  All this must go on without her; did she resent it; or did it not become consoling to believe that death ended absolutely?’  An even more dominant theme of The Hours, though, on the screen as on the page, is sexuality.  Clarissa Vaughan, although she has had affairs with men and has a twenty-year-old daughter, Julia (Claire Danes), now lives in a same-sex relationship, with Sally Lester (Allison Janney) – a kind of partnership that was  hardly an option for the likes of Laura Brown and Virginia Woolf (even if  it was less frowned upon within the Bloomsbury Group than in post-World War II American suburbia).  Laura’s neighbour, Kitty (Toni Collette), drops by with upsetting news – she has to go into hospital for tests on a uterine growth, and is clearly frightened.  Laura’s comforting hug is the prelude to an extended kiss:  Laura then seeks reassurance that Kitty didn’t mind and gets the reply, ‘What? I didn’t mind what?’   As she and her brood are about to set off home to London from Richmond, Vanessa Bell is startled by Virginia’s passionate farewell kiss, again smack on the lips.  The point being made is clear – kisses from women virtually forbidden from expressing their true sexual nature – yet both moments are confusing, too.  Virginia Woolf’s lesbianism may have extended to incestuous feelings for her sister but it feels odd that the film stresses such feelings exclusively (even for viewers who realise that Vanessa is a kind of proxy for Sally Seton, whom Clarissa Dalloway once kissed romantically).  When Laura and Kitty embrace, the former is standing up and the latter sitting down.  It’s Kitty’s mouth, hungrily upturned towards Laura’s, that seems to initiate the kiss yet it’s Laura, once it’s over, who considers herself responsible.

The 1950s sequence, in effect, is more extensively confusing.  Are we meant to think both women desire each other rather than their respective husbands?  Is that what Kitty, when she asks ‘didn’t mind what?’, is suggesting; or do her words mean that she knows Laura’s kiss is so shameful it must simply be denied?  Even if it’s only Laura who is lesbian, that sexual preference skews her dissatisfaction with life, by implying that it has a single cause.  There’s more to it than that.  In the excellent introduction to the film’s main characters, Stephen Daldry describes, through intercutting, the start of Virginia’s, Clarissa’s and Laura’s day.  The last-named is still in bed when her husband, Dan (John C Reilly), before he goes to work, comes in with a bunch of flowers for Laura and searches for a vase in their kitchen cupboards.  Laura’s face shows how the noise of the cupboard doors gets on her nerves.  This is the first evidence that she can’t get mad with her husband because he’s so thoroughly decent:  Dan has bought her flowers yet we soon learn that today is his birthday.  His niceness, his love of his wife and their child make Laura’s situation all the more claustrophobic because she has no cause to complain.  It matters, of course, if she would rather share her bed with a woman but Laura struggles with home life, practically and emotionally, in other ways, too.  Kitty, as soon as she enters the kitchen, observes Laura’s cack-handed attempt to bake Dan a birthday cake – ‘I don’t understand why you find it so difficult … everyone can make a cake – it’s ridiculously easy!’  When she notices the copy of Mrs Dalloway on the counter Kitty’s tone is gently reproving:  here’s evidence that Laura has slipped back into bad habits – ‘Oh, you’re reading a book – what’s this one about?’  Then, and most important, there’s Laura’s seven-year-old son, Richie (Jack Rovello).

Stephen Daldry had already directed a boy actor with great skill, in Billy Elliot (2000); although the role of Richie Brown is far smaller in terms of screen time, Jack Rovello is hardly less memorable than Jamie Bell.  It’s soon clear that Richie is intensely attached to his mother and that Laura, although she loves him, often finds that attachment overwhelming.  His open neediness and Laura’s inability to cope with it reach a distressing climax when she drives off to the hotel.  On the pretext that she has a hairdresser’s appointment, she leaves Richie with another neighbour, Mrs Latch (Margo Martindale).  He escapes Mrs Latch’s grasp and runs out to the road, yelling for his mother, as Laura’s car recedes into the distance.  When Laura decides to bake the cake for Dan, Richie wants to help.  Like Kitty, he’s puzzled that this is such a big deal for Laura:

Richie               Mommy, it isn’t that difficult.

Laura                I know, I know it isn’t difficult, it’s just that I… just wanna do this for daddy.

Richie               Because it’s his birthday?

Laura                That’s right.  Bake him the cake to show him that we love him.

Richie               Otherwise he won’t know we love him?

Laura                That’s right.

Richie is puzzled again – but says nothing – as he watches Laura and Kitty embrace.  When his mother returns to pick him up from Mrs Latch and they drive home, he tells Laura he loves her and she tells him, ‘You’re my guy’.

Her first cake attempt ends up in the waste bin; a second, improved effort is presented to Dan on his return from work in the evening.  He, Laura and Richie sit together at the kitchen table, and Dan is joyful, ‘This is perfect, this is just perfect!’  The poignant scenes involving the Browns, beautifully written and played, may be the film’s best – it’s in these that The Hours seems to break free of its schematic source material.  Not for long, though.  The revelation that Richie aged into screwed-up, AIDS-stricken Richard, although it has momentary impact, almost as quickly feels phony.  Ed Harris’s Richard is shackled to Michael Cunningham’s schema:  beside the emotional truthfulness and power of Jack Rovello’s Richie, the middle-aged Richard is a forced, melodramatic conception and presence, his fate dictated by the fate of Septimus Smith (an aspiring poet until World War I drove him mad) in Mrs Dalloway.

Clarissa Vaughan has been caring for the ailing Richard as best she can; she has a set of keys to his apartment and, about to enter, always raps on the front door in a way he’ll recognise; in reply he calls out ‘Mrs Dalloway’, his nickname for her.  Yet Clarissa doesn’t seem to realise she’s living the novel Mrs Dalloway.  Her first words, ‘Sally, I think I’ll buy the flowers myself’, echo its famous opening line (‘Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself’).  As in the novel, the flowers are for the party that the woman buying them is to host that evening.  But Clarissa Vaughan, talking with the florist (Eileen Atkins), shows no awareness that she’s doing what Clarissa Dalloway did.  In their last meeting, Richard, trying to cool the argument they’re having, asks Clarissa to tell him ‘a story from your day’.  She replies, ‘I went out – I went to buy flowers – like Mrs Dalloway in the book’ – as if the connection had just occurred to her.

This might not be such an issue if Clarissa and Richard weren’t so entrenched in the world of literature; as it is, the exchanges between them seem fundamentally artificial, stifled by Mrs Dalloway.  It’s here, too, that The Hours on screen is at a disadvantage with The Hours as a book.  Michael Cunningham’s prose is sometimes pastiche Virginia Woolf, creating an illusion that the non-Virginia episodes in the novel are nevertheless somehow mediated through her.  Stephen Daldry and David Hare can’t devise an equivalent to this.  Meryl Streep’s resourcefulness sometimes saves the day, though.  Clarissa’s decision to buy the flowers herself reflects, like Mrs Dalloway’s, a wish to be in control of events.  In New York Clarissa’s case, these spin out of control rapidly.  Streep plays her alternation between panic and determined high spirits very well but even better is a scene when Clarissa, in conversation with her daughter Julia, is more quietly reminiscent.  She recalls, from the time when she and Richard were students together, ‘one morning, getting up at dawn … there was such a sense of possibility …’  Streep truly relives the memory.

The Virginia Woolf element of The Hours is limited in a different way from the New York one:  it has the feel of an attenuated biopic but there are still fine things in it.  Stephen Dillane is a superb Leonard Woolf, busy running the Hogarth Press from home, worried about his wife’s mental health and often dismayed by her behaviour.  Dillane leavens all this with rueful wit and a real sense of Leonard’s physical and intellectual energy.  Linda Bassett is splendid as Nelly, the Woolfs’ exasperated cook.  The household’s routines, such as they are, are well observed although one bit doesn’t seem to make sense.  When Vanessa and her children arrive early, Nelly goes in alarm to report this to Leonard, who doesn’t want to be interrupted from his work.  You assume the lady of the house must have gone AWOL for Nelly to trouble Leonard but we then immediately see Virginia with her sister.  Miranda Richardson is expert in that smallish role and the kids playing the Bell children all do well.  Sophie Wyburd has more opportunity to shine than the two boys but they have a strong moment sniggering at their eccentric aunt and the avian obsequies.

Nicole Kidman’s Virginia is problematic, however.  Her prosthetic nose certainly has a remarkable effect:  she doesn’t look like Nicole Kidman or Virginia Woolf.  (You don’t recognise her voice either.)  Wearing a mask can be liberating for an actor and that happens here to some extent:  it enables more concentrated, less self-aware playing from Kidman than was usual for her at the time.  She hasn’t much variety, though, and, at thirty-five, seems too young for her part – even in 1923 (when Virginia Woolf had only just turned forty), let alone 1941.  It says a lot about the kind of performance favoured by the Academy – conspicuous casting against type has often paid dividends – that Kidman won the Best Actress Oscar for The Hours.  Meryl Streep now has twenty-one Oscar nominations to her name but they don’t include one for this film, in which she does brilliant work playing a woman of her own generation and class.  The supporting performances in The Hours are nearly all first rate:  an exception is Ed Harris’s strenuous, all-stops-out interpretation of the doomed Richard yet it was Harris, rather than Stephen Dillane, who got a Best Supporting Actor nomination[1].  Julianne Moore’s Best Supporting Actress nod was more deserved.  She’s convincing not only in the Los Angeles scenes but also as the elderly Laura Brown, who turns out to be Clarissa’s only guest on the night of the party.

Clarissa contacts Richard’s mother with news of his death; Laura takes the next flight to New York from Toronto, her home for many years.  Mother and son are long estranged.  Laura explains to Clarissa that, on the birth of her second child, she walked out on her family and began a new life in Canada.  (We don’t know if she found love there, only that she got a job in a library.)  Julianne Moore’s tone of calm regret is persuasive yet the elderly Laura’s backstory is a capper on The Hours’ many miseries.  The film – true in this respect also to the novel – takes itself very seriously indeed, so much so that there are times when you find yourself trying not to laugh.  For us residents of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, it’s hardest to keep a straight face when Virginia delivers the punchline to a showdown with Leonard on a platform at Richmond station, whence she’s planning to catch the London train.  He has reminded her that ‘it was London that brought you low … we brought you to Richmond to give you peace’.  She replies that ‘if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death’.  (I should make clear, by the way, that we’ve been living in the Richmond area for twenty-eight years and I’m very glad we do.)  Intentional laughs are desperately thin on the ground.  You’re very grateful for Sally’s humorous dismay when she sees Clarissa’s seating plan for the party; Sally will be next to Louis Waters (Jeff Daniels), Richard’s former partner, and asks Clarissa, ‘Why do I always have to sit next to the ex-es?  Is it some kind of hint, sweetheart?’

Those lines are amusing in themselves but Allison Janney’s reading of them makes them elating.  She and other members of the extraordinary cast keep giving the audience a lift:  there’s such pleasure in watching these actors, regardless of how grim their roles are.  Although Kitty, who’s in just the one scene, may be the grimmest of the lot, you cherish Toni Collette’s characterisation.  She perfectly embodies a particular social type of a particular era – her 1950s dress fits her like a skin (or a suit of armour) – yet she makes Kitty vividly individual.  Claire Danes’ fluid, bracingly natural playing of Julia looks all the more remarkable in the light of her calcified acting in season after season of Homeland.  Stephen Daldry can’t control Ed Harris; otherwise, he orchestrates the performances admirably.  That railway station sequence, well acted as it is (it’s one of Nicole Kidman’s best bits), is very staged, though:  other commuters are too polite to appear on the platform until there’s a pause in the Woolfs’ high-volume war of words.

A complaining footnote … BFI is showing The Hours as part of their Philip Glass season (I watched it in the newly refurbished NFT1, although the worn carpet is still there).  It was immediately clear that this was a grotty print of the film – the colour was degraded, the images were sometimes unfocused.  To make matters worse, there was no sound at all at the start:  the uninitiated wouldn’t have known they were missing Virginia’s voiceover.   When the soundtrack eventually arrived, there was a persistent hum on it, except when Philip Glass’s intricate, insistent score drowned it out.  This seemed a rather negative way of getting the audience to appreciate Glass’s music.

11 August 2024

[1] John C Reilly was also nominated that year, though for Chicago rather than The Hours.