Sometimes a film comes along at just the right time.
It had occurred to me that now might be the right time for me to see The Hours, having read and loved Mrs Dalloway this semester, and also becoming increasingly serious about the possibility of writing a novel myself as the days and nights stretch into summer. But I hadn't realised just how right it would turn out to be - The Hours is a gorgeous film and touched me deeply.
I think that it made a big difference that I was familiar with Mrs Dalloway, and also, I guess, that my sensitivities and sensibilities are such as to make me receptive to both book and film. In one way, The Hours is 'about' Mrs Dalloway, but it also somehow mysteriously 'feels' like Woolf's book, developing many of the same ideas and, in the process, moving me in many of the same ways. Well, it's about life, I suppose, and choices - so sad and yet ultimately hopeful. There's a clear-sightedness and a truth to it.
As a film, it's very graceful and completely involving. Feels quite literary, and I can imagine people (sophisticated film-goers at that) finding it rather slow going, but I truly didn't want it to end. Yet it ends exactly when and as it had to.
The acting is wonderful. Kidman's Woolf is tormented, needy, alluring, human - I saw echoes of myself and of many people I know in her. Julianne Moore is fragile and unbearably sad. Meryl Streep is note perfect. For all three, this was the best I've seen them. And the supports are just right - Ed Harris, Stephen Dillane (as Leonard Woolf), Claire Danes, Toni Collette (in a brief cameo), and all the others.
The choice of Philip Glass to provide the score at first struck me as being rather out of left field, but in fact works perfectly - his cyclic, mournfully pretty compositions set just the right tone and provide a link for the three stories beyond the parallels and the book Mrs Dalloway itself.
There's so much more to say, but I can't find the words to say it. I can't say it better than the film itself does.
Anyway, I suspect that 'objectively' The Hours isn't a 'great' film, whatever that means. But what can I say? It spoke to me. Sometimes a film is just right.
