A Super Delayed Response to "The Hours"

Hey! I liked this movie! The first thing I thought, just looking at the cover, is that this is like a "mom nirvana" type movie. At least for my mom. Powerhouse dramatic actresses in Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman, plus Ed Harris! When I told her that it was an involved, moving and disturbing film that rides largely on the acting performances, I think she started salivating.

But that's beside the point. One of the coolest things this movie did was almost splatter-paint the characters of Mrs. Dalloway into the world of The Hours. The identities, problems, feelings, and personalities were each compartmentalized and then tossed into a nice movie salad. The prime example of this would be the movie version of Richard. A relatively unexplored character in the book is given further complexities and identity in the film, by maintaining the closeness and house life with "Clarissa", but giving him the reflection and prose of Septimus, and the homosexual love qualities briefly expressed by Sally and Clarissa in the book (which basically all of the important female cast expresses in the film). This new character of movie Richard, by having the qualities of characters in the novel, keeps the encompassing themes of Mrs. Dalloway while giving a fresh take of a new person. The Hours is extremely successful in this overall regard, carrying over themes of the novel by using the individual character traits without making the characters seem unexplained or totally rehashed.

The novel version of Mrs. Dalloway was also perfectly embodied in the film. The deeply explored, multifaceted character is split and elaborated with three separate figures in the movie. Clarissa is the housewife, partythrower, slightly on edge version of Mrs. Dalloway. Caring for Sally and Richard in simultaneous wife-like relationships (that are similar to the Dalloway's interactions in the novel), while carrying out a lot of the physical actions of book Mrs. Dalloway. The 1950's Laura Brown was the somber, sympathetic side of Mrs. Dalloway, with deep seated isolation and disconnect from her husband that we occasionally see in the novel. And Nicole Kidman with her prosthesis nose portrayed Virginia Woolf, intermittently and effectively appearing in the story to reflect herself among the other two split personalities. Reading the novel before this makes The Hours a joy to watch for me. Each part of Mrs. Dalloway is picked apart but then nuanced in different situations. Kind of speaks for the complexity that Woolf wrote Clarissa Dalloway with, that her personal aspects can be made into three separate lead characters in three tangentially related plots.