So I could hardly help reading this book in light of the film, particularly given that it was the film which inspired the reading, and particularly particularly because, it turns out, the film follows the structure of the book very closely, almost as a scene-for-scene adaptation. Well-nigh impossible to imagine how I would've responded to Cunningham's novel had I read it before coming across the film, but I have to assume that I would've liked it. As it is, I definitely liked it, but always found myself mentally leaping ahead to anticipate what I knew was coming...
In terms of the film, then:
- Overall, the film has a somewhat more dramatic bent, directed, I think, at heightening the audience's responses to Virginia, Clarissa and Laura. The first of the scenes in which Clarissa and Richard confront each other in the latter's squalid apartment, for example, has an edge and a sense of simmering anger, disappointment, almost spite, which is absent from the book's treatment, which is more polite and subdued. In another example, Clarissa's breakdown in the kitchen doesn't occur in the book - instead, it's Louis who cries. Also, Laura's dalliance with the idea of death - suicide - has a much different cast.
- Unsurprisingly, too, the novel contains several allusions to Mrs Dalloway which don't make it into the film, mostly (as far as I gathered) strengthening the parallels between Clarissa Vaughan and Woolf's Clarissa Dalloway - the appearance of the trailer within which sits an unknowable celebrity, say, in parallel to the passing motorcade in Woolf's novel, or Oliver St Ive's invitation of Sally (but not Clarissa) to lunch...of course (and this is implicit in the film, too), it's intriguing that The Hours rewrites the Sally/Clarissa relationship into a stable, long-term openly lesbian relationship (as opposed to the hints and allusions regarding the youthful relationship between Sally Seton and Clarissa Dalloway in Woolf's novel).
- Strikingly, the pathos of Woolf herself is highlighted in the film, and she is more central to its narrative. This comes through in many small ways - the drama of the confrontation with Leonard at the train station (as opposed to the gentle left-unspokenness of the novel's treatment), the empathy which Angelica seems to share with her (completely absent from novel), the return to her story at the end...
- Also, the activist Mary Krull and her relationship to Julia is omitted from the film, presumably for reasons of narrative economy (even in the context of the novel, it's interesting but scarcely necessary); similarly some of the other strands of the novel...again to prevent detracting from the Virginia/Clarissa/Laura focus.
Art, love, death, life. (What a lark! What a plunge!) And so it goes...
