"The Hours" is a film told in three intertwining parts. The first story line takes place in 1941 and tells the story of Virginia Woolf's (Nicole Kidman) final days before her suicide. Kidman, with an enlarged, fake nose and dyed hair, looks astonishly different, and reminiscent of when Cameron Diaz played the frizzy-haired animal lover in "Being John Malkovich."
The second story is set in 1951, and Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is clearly in a state of existential hell. She is not fusing with her young son (Jack Rovello), her loving husband (John C. Reily) or any of her work as a housewife and mother. She reads the book "Mrs. Dalloway," written by Woolf, and feels kindred to the hopelessness of the character.
Finally, Meryl Streep plays modern-day Clarissa Vaughn, a New York, late-in-life lesbian throwing a party to celebrate the achievements of her ex-lover and friend Robert (Ed Harris) who is a famous poet dying of AIDS. Robert calls Clarissa "Mrs. Dalloway."
Aside from the obvious literary threads woven into each story, the three women share depression, suicide (not all the woman commit or attempt it, but they are in some way affected by it), parties and intimacy with other women.
Although this film has all of the makings to be weepy and warm fuzzy, it isn't. This is a difficult film with sharp edges. Despite its exploration of women, past and present, and their common emotional states, the male supporting roles are also powerful. Both John C. Reily and Stephen Dillane play amazingly supportive husbands.
The imagery in the film is beautiful, with Woolf's drowning in a weedy pond echoed by Brown's hallucination of drowning in her bed. Pleasingly, the water image isn't again repeated in the modern-day story, which makes the film seem less contrived. Sometimes the stories overlap, and sometimes they don't, just like life.
"The Hours" is a moving film with all three story lines equally as solid. It won't cheer you up, but it will definitely make viewers, especially women, feel connected.
Starts Fri., Jan. 17 in theaters everywhere.
Molly Snyder started writing and publishing her work at the age 10, when her community newspaper printed her poem, "The Unicorn.” Since then, she's expanded beyond the subject of mythical creatures and written in many different mediums but, nearest and dearest to her heart, thousands of articles for OnMilwaukee.
Molly is a regular contributor to FOX6 News and numerous radio stations as well as the co-host of "Dandelions: A Podcast For Women.” She's received five Milwaukee Press Club Awards, served as the Pfister Narrator and is the Wisconsin State Fair’s Celebrity Cream Puff Eating Champion of 2019.
