'The Hours': Depression ripples through time

By Stephen Hunter
The Washington Post

THE HOURS (114 minutes) is rated PG-13 for emotional intensity and examinations of suicide.

This movie is so meta it threatens to go radioactive. It's part historical re-creation, part roman a clef, part completely new fiction. It takes place in four separate time frames, unifying two by blood and two by the only thing stronger than blood: literature. Then, of course, it forces this material through the post-mod Cuisinart, mixing it all up in time and space, and plays the parts against one another for maximum dramatic effect.

It would be all too precious to watch except for the brilliant performances, which make it too wonderful not to watch. A gritty thematic commonality also unifies it: No matter where we are in time, space or literature, we are concerned with insanity, self-destruction, the perishability of love, homosexuality and great writing. It's a fabulous contrivance, even if Nicole Kidman, wearing a plastic nose to disguise her seemingly undisguisable Nicole Kidmanness, looks more like Kathleen Kennedy Townsend than Virginia Woolf.

For the director Stephen Daldry, working from the novel by Michael Cunningham and a screenplay by playwright David Hare, it's an amazing change. He broke through two years back with a feel-good hymnal (Watch! as the human spirit triumphs!) called "Billy Elliot." "The Hours" is a far more adult excursion, yet he holds the combustible materials in tight control. It never spills over to blubbering emotionalism.

The movie begins on a fateful English spring day in 1941 when Woolf, seemingly at the height of her powers and the pinnacle of her fame, fills her pockets with rocks and steps into a nearby river. The stones do their duty and the river sucks the life from the great writer. Chronically depressed, fearful of losing her sanity, exhausted, she took no pleasure in the brilliant accomplishments of a lifetime, the love of family and strangers alike; she cared only to end it all.

From that bitter ending of a beginning, the movie spills backward and forward, using as its road map one of Woolf's greatest novels, "Mrs. Dalloway." In one of its other three narrative segments, it recounts Woolf's struggle to write the novel two decades earlier (from 1922 to 1925, when it was published), whose working title, for the record, was "The Hours." The movie never directly dramatizes "Mrs. Dalloway," but the book's events seem a kind of template for all that does happen: Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway goes through a day in which she's preparing for a party, seemingly in perfect command; yet her internal voices are compelling her toward self-destruction so profoundly that each small accomplishment — buying flowers, for example — seems heroic. In the end, she doesn't commit suicide, but someone does.

What we see in the film is how that drama mirrors Woolf's own as she struggles with her desperations while her husband, the devoted publisher Leonard Woolf (Stephen Dillane), tries to pay the bills. Her much happier sister Vanessa Bell (Miranda Richardson) comes by with a passel of beautiful, rambunctious kids whose life force contrasts ironically with Virginia's death force.

But the movie doesn't stick in the '20s any longer than it stuck in 1941; suddenly it flies forward to Southern California in the early 1950s, where a brittle pregnant housewife, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), struggles with her own interior dramas while obsessively reading a book called "Mrs. Dalloway" by Virginia Woolf. Of Moore's two recent roles as oppressed '50s housewife, I much prefer this one. The fundamental unbelievability of "Far From Heaven" was her character's cluelessness at the forces surrounding her. Here, her Laura Brown is keenly aware of the disconnect between how she should feel and how she does feel, and the realization that while everyone tells her she should be happy (doting hubby, bun in oven, split-level, subscription to Life magazine), she isn't. Not by a long shot. And she, too, is contemplating suicide.

We don't linger in the '50s, either. To a certain extent, "The Hours" is a time travel extravaganza, for next it deposits us in our own time — sort of. We are chronologically in the present, but plotistically (Wow! There's a neologism!) we're back in 1925. That is, we're in "Mrs. Dalloway," but Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway has become Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep, uncannily, eerily perfect), who is planning a party, buying flowers, fighting off depression, dealing with emotional difficulties in today's New York. Clarissa is a Manhattan editor who, though disengaged from her disloyal lover (Allison Janney) and her wan daughter (Claire Danes), is optimistically giving a party for a friend, a famous novelist and poet (Ed Harris) dying of AIDS. (The disease, incidentally, is used in the same way that Woolf used World War I battle experience in "Mrs. Dalloway": as a dispiriting crucible for a minor character.) But the honored writer is even more depressed than Clarissa, and everybody in this tight little literary orbit is affected by his bitterness, the source of which turns out to be something in another of the movie's narratives.

Oh, it gets tricky, it gets fancy, it yields wheels within wheels and connections within connections. But it never disconnects from its central issue, which is depression. The movie may not acknowledge it formally, but it is a study of how people cope with this terrible disease: Virginia by writing and ultimately by committing suicide; another by fleeing; still another by yielding to corrosive bitterness; and another by yielding to something far worse, which is emotional numbness.

"The Hours" flirts with bathos all the time, with the nakedness of emotions and tears and the hurtful things that people do and say in private life as they try to seize some space for themselves. But it never disconnects from two values: its honesty and its intensity.