A real tear-jerker

10 April 2012

Come to a literary party: one being given by three women. Time and continents separate them.

In Richmond, England, in 1923, a depressive Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) resentfully pours tea for her elder sister, Vanessa Bell (Miranda Richardson), and children, briefly interrupting her work on a new novel, Mrs Dalloway, about a woman who gives parties "to cover the silence". The guests gone, the writer goes back to contemplating suicide.

In Los Angeles, in 1949, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), an American housewife incompetent at most household chores, fails to bake her husband an eatable birthday cake, leaves her small boy with a neighbour and goes off to a hotel to dip into Woolf 's now published novel, Mrs Dalloway, and contemplate suicide.

In 2001, in New York, Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a literary agent, chooses the flowers for a party for her prize-winning author Richard (Ed Harris), an Aids victim, who has taken 10 years to write a novel about a woman who kills herself. He's now contemplating his own suicide.

"Lilies," reflects Clarissa, who bears Mrs Dalloway's first name, "are too morbid." But lilies are the flower of choice for the death-ridden film Stephen Daldry has made from David Hare's adaptation of an awardwinning American novel by Michael Cunningham, which attempts to give us "a life in the day" of these women.

They have more in common than they know: self-doubt, low selfesteem, smothered desperation, and easeful dreams of ending it all. Their day's agendas alternate, at first in short bursts that leave you puzzling to connect one to another; then in longer parallels of latitude and loneliness; finally, in one case, meeting for mutual commiseration.

Cunningham's novel, it was said, was unfilmable. Nonsense: the novel is already half-way to being a film. From The French Lieutenant's Woman to last year's Possessed, such

discrete narratives of different times, different people, play out the tensions as they wind the characters in to a common destiny. The problem isn't construction: Hare's script solves that flawlessly. The problem is communication: getting what's inside people's minds into the outside world's hearing. It's here that The Hours drags.

"Literary" novels have instant appeal for a Hollywood producer such as Scott Rudin, who's made a heap of money and is thirsty for kudos. In earlier times, Hollywood honchos used to film novels like The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts or Day of the Locust, modern classics revered on the campuses of the US academies that the producers hadn't attended, but could honour in absentia, as it were, by making the movie of the masterpiece.

Nowadays, there's a fast track for such wishful quality-seekers provided by each new literary sensation cresting the New York Times best-sellers' list.

Rudin failed to hit bonanza time when he bought Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes, because the British director he engaged landed him with a ton-load of unsaleable misery. With The Hours, he's learned his lesson and probably will achieve his objective: Oscars, box office, and "class", too.

Daldry, his director, is a tastemaster of finesse; Hare, his screenwriter, has a talent for getting women to explain themselves to each other, which is perfect for a film in which the women do little else. They may lead miserable lives, but, boy, do they keep fingering every precious bead on the rosary of suffering.

The Hours addresses a particular female malaise - self-perceived worthlessness, adding up to a fervent prayer for release from anomie. It's the most marketable sort of masochism: it sells feminine sensibility without involving film-goers in the pain. Beginning with Virginia Woolf 's suicide by drowning in 1941, it immediately prettifies the event.

Though the novelist actually died in a murky old river on a raw March day, Nicole Kidman stalks along like a catwalk model through high-summer foliage and enters the sun-dappled stream like one of those spooky ads for women's fashions you used to see in the glossies.

Only now it's the film that wears the gloss. Such chic selectivity is a sure sign of a producer like Rudin dolling up the shots, even though Daldry, the director, is calling them.

Kidman's much-touted resemblance to Virginia Woolf extends no further than a prosthetic nose. She lacks the big-boned frame, the heavy-lidded eyes, the judgmental looks, even the requisite years (Woolf was 59 when she killed herself and Kidman looks a decade or so too young). But she knows how to play the self-absorbed writer, all right, passively bully the servants and throw a tantrum, even if the argy-bargy with her husband, a picky, pedantic Leonard Woolf (played by Stephen Dillane just right), is one of the worst-written scenes I can recall in films. ("This is not you speaking, Virginia - this is an aspect of your illness.")

The two of them yell at each other on a deserted platform at Richmond station, until a well-timed horde of commuters mercifully ends the bathos of Virginia bewailing her rural isolation, "If it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death." Even then, poor railway timetables got one down so.

The film is replete with womanly feelings couched in the language of literary introspection. "I remember one morning, getting up at dawn, there was such a sense of possibility," muses Julianne Moore's Laura Brown, spreading her suicide pills neatly out on the coverlet in the LA hotel that, improbably, hasn't enquired what a lone lady without

luggage might want with a doublebed room. "To ponder self-extinction" is, perhaps, not an option to be telling the front desk.

Moore is very good in the role, however: she draws on Laura's sense of unworthy motherhood to reinforce the character's conflicted womanhood.

In the New York scenes, Meryl Streep at first brings a welcome rhythm of urban survival, rather than emotional drift, into the narrative. But pretty soon it's clear that her clipped, chatty manner while arranging flowers for the party - Eileen Atkins, nicely sharp-tongued as the florist - is also a cover for avoiding commitment.

Her breakdown in front of her suicidally inclined author, Richard, is another confessional moment that makes you cringe at literary dialogue that's never been soiled by human lips.

ALL through the film, there's a powerful sense of women compulsively and endlessly feeling out any toxic lump that may reside in their gender. There's a lot of same-sex solidarity, too: kisses for support, as well as love. It's all emotionally needful. Even the film's craftsmanship, its use of light, attention to detail, variety of period tempo, induces an overwhelming feeling of "quality control" being imposed on every moment of every scene.

Philip Glass's music is like an emotional tumbler-dryer: it churns away until you feel wrung out. Not that it makes you feel miserable - who wants another Angela's Ashes? In such a film, even death has to have uplift. Where you expect an obituary note, what you get is a placebo: someone has to die, so that the rest of us can value life more.

Stepping decorously into the river, without fear, stumble, or even burble as the water closes over her, Kidman tells us to "look life in the face ... know it for what it is ... then put it away".