The Hours; Top 10 in '02

Directed by Stephen Daldry /> Clumsy yet obvious, Stephen Daldry’s inept direction vaguely distracts one from the political agenda behind The Hours. Although the story, set in three different time periods, pleads against the various oppressions endured by gay women (Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, Julianne Moore as a California housewife in the 1950s, Meryl Streep as a contemporary Manhattan matron), The Hours is primarily an act of social-climbing. Reaching far beyond the simplistic talent he displayed in the working-class fable of his 2000 debut film Billy Elliot, Daldry this time caters to that silent minority of gay and feminist gentry–the Laura Ashley- and Virginia Woolf-collecting set that Merchant-Ivory have recently left in the lurch.

Daldry slavishly adapts Michael Cunningham’s 1998 novel-conceit The Hours as a mawkish extension of the covert homosexuality in Billy Elliot. Since Daldry readily implies homophobia is a social problem keeping boys and women from fulfilling their emotional potential, it’s puzzling that he depicts it with such circumspection and then dubiously connects homophobia’s defeat to class advancement (not moral victory). If this strategy isn’t immediately apparent in The Hours, it’s only due to the movie’s swanky, prestigious veneer.

Once again Daldry very shrewdly appeals to high-flown theatrical tastes that knock some viewers silly (and frequently win Oscars). It’s stunning to see how the media swallows The Hours’ hard sell, extolling Kidman, Moore and Streep’s participation as if they’d stepped down from Mount Olympus. They’re snootier than Woolf herself, who at least cast an eye at the unfortunate classes in Mrs. Dalloway’s subsidiary character Septimus Warren Smith. No one seems to mind that these divas are in the service of the most dour sob story since Iris (in which middle-aged Judi Dench as Iris Murdoch offered less literary cachet and far less sex appeal).

Soft-peddled sexuality is part of Daldry’s cunning. Billy Elliot was a chickenhawk balletomane fantasy; it won over audiences who were too hoity-toity to appreciate the sweetly moving and upfront gay teen romance Beautiful Thing. Here, Daldry makes a none-too-subtle fetish out of Virginia Woolf (just the way 60s playboys would put erotic sketch books on their bachelor pad coffee tables). He uses high art to sanction homosexuality. Cunningham had already exegeted Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway into two sets of modern-day metaphors, then added his own literary pretensions. Daldry adds artifice on top of stylization on top of an experiment.

As Woolf/Kidman struggles to write her novel, L.A. mom/Moore reads it during bouts of depression and child-rearing, then Manhattanite Streep flits about town as the care-giver to Moore’s now-adult AIDS-afflicted son (Ed Harris), and finds her lesbian life uncannily following the same arc as the fictional Mrs. Dalloway’s. If any of this made sense it still would be rather much. What stops it from being entirely laughable is that scene after scene offers chaste, scrupulously performed sexual misery.

Strangely, The Hours isn’t much about sex or art (or even the psychological preoccupation with time); it’s about achieving upper-middle-class tone, seeking the eclat associated with high-art themes. Woolf’s life is treated questionably, reduced to gay/feminist iconography in the mode of an Anglo Frida Kahlo. The filmmakers (including screenwriter David Hare) congratulate themselves on having read A Room of One’s Own as well as Cunningham’s gloss, as if both tomes qualified them to misinterpret Woolf’s oeuvre. (And critics are so cowed by the Importance they don’t dare critique the facetious drama.) When this obsession with tone manifests itself in Philip Glass’ annoying score the whole film becomes a tone-deaf fiasco. (A friend dubbed it Meryl Streep on the Beach.)

Due to the mawkish proceedings, The Hours doesn’t give you what Woolf does at her best: the elation of art capturing existential experience. It’s a banal–and dramatically crippling–device to move between different sets of characters all stymied by the thought: What’s Life About? The movie itself feels lifeless, especially when it spins off from a ludicrously, infuriatingly lyrical depiction of Woolf’s suicide. Twentieth-century artists did learn from Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness style. You can feel it in the excitement of Alain Resnais’ time shifts, Antonioni’s cosmic pondering, Terence Davies’ and Bertolucci’s voluptuous feats of memorializing the past. But Daldry (and Hare) practice stodgy legerdemain. Woolf’s esthetic breakthrough–her advances in time, rhythm and structure–is ignored for something sentimental and banal but with the appearance of "art."

The Hours is Far from Heaven for people who think themselves literate. But certainly not visually literate. Daldry’s montage of egg-breaking and cooking across time is embarrassingly crude. What comes through is a white, female version of Antwone Fisher–victimization through the ages but with a special pseudo-intellectual difference: no uplift, just misery. Kidman, Moore and Streep should stop short before they take bows for patronizing gay experience this way.

Streep has developed a natural, almost Rosemary Harris-like grace and she’s the only cast member to use her voice effectively, but playing a modern-day Mrs. Dalloway is thankless–especially when made unerotic. Moore’s performance, unfortunately, comes too close behind her dried-out spaciness for Todd Haynes in Far from Heaven. Plus she’s saddled with the grotesquely unsubtle Toni Collette in a key scene of female pathology; their duet repeats the fatuous cliche that the 50s were a drag. Pretty Nicole Kidman "courageously" wears homely makeup that fools will mistake for great acting, but Kidman lacks the capacity certain actresses have to convey intelligence. She’s always fulminating, pathetically. There’s no sense of a female writer’s intellect possessing her being (which Vanessa Redgrave had portraying a Woolf-like Agatha Christie in Agatha). Kidman’s putty nose is less convincing than Noah Taylor’s Max makeup (which made him look more like Prince than Hitler). Deprived of Kidman’s glamour, we simply see her emotional ordinariness, which essentializes Woolf too much. (When Miranda Richardson comes onscreen as Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell, she shows what real acting is all about.)

Without a credible sense of life being worth living–which one got from Woolf, from the lesbian kiss in The Color Purple, from Beautiful Thing–this film’s reduction of suffering to Bloomsbury/SoHo effeteness is simply maudlin. Critic Gregory Solman recalled that John Huston’s Reflections in a Golden Eye also dealt well with sexually repressed characters. Indeed, Huston adapted Carson McCullers to portray sexual anxiety as a symptom of modern alienation. It’s startling to remember how socially responsible Hollywood filmmakers could be–and Reflections came before Stonewall! Behind its gilded 21st-century affectations, The Hours shows filmmakers content to reduce suffering and art to status symbols.

1) Femme Fatale, Brian De Palma

2) Catch Me If You Can, Steven Spielberg

3) Time Out, Laurent Cantet

4) Minority Report, Steven Spielberg

5) All or Nothing, Mike Leigh

6) Storytelling, Todd Solondz

7) The Cat’s Meow, Peter Bogdanovich

8) The Triumph of Love, Clare Peploe

9) 24 Hour Party People, Michael Winterbottom

10) Songs from the Second Floor, Roy Andersson />