Some unsophisticated guys I know have dismissed Stephen Daldry's The Hours as just -- in their casual yet stinging words -- "a chick flick."
In their minds, this indicates a movie that might be interesting only to women because women are the main characters, because a clutch of amazing actresses star in it and because the story plumbs the female creative spirit.
These guys clearly lack imagination. This complex, multi-story, multi-era and quietly breathtaking film speaks universal truths that unite the genders even while recognizing the fundamental differences between us. It does so with a courageous clarity and with such conviction and beauty that the ideas in play resonate long after the film's end credits fade.
The screenplay -- an Oscar nomination candidate -- was exquisitely adapted by playwright and screenwriter David Hare from Michael Cunningham's 1999 novel The Hours, a Pulitzer Prize winner from 1998. Cunningham, in turn, was inspired to explore the nature of the female experience -- including lesbianism, bisexuality and other variations on the sexual self -- by Virginia Woolf's tragic life and the writing of her 1925 novel, Mrs. Dalloway. That book figures into the lives of three different sets of people in the three eras that the story of The Hours covers so elegantly.
Those amazing actresses who appear here don't hurt at all. Their stunning performances should be celebrated by anyone who appreciates the purity of screen acting at its finest.
The lead players, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman, are astonishing, each in turn, each separately.
A sterling support cast rivals the leads. Toni Collette, in an emotional kitchen scene with Moore, collaborates on one of the most powerful and poignant scenes imaginable, a scene of such refinement that everything that needs to be said is said with the act of being, not the act of talking about it.
Other actors, men and women, are up to the task, too, with great work from Claire Danes, Ed Harris, Jeff Daniels Stephen Dillane, John C. Reilly and Miranda Richardson.
None is better, however, than Kidman as Virginia Woolf. And not just because director Stephen Daldry (a British theatre veteran who established his film career with Billy Elliot) helped create with a new prosthetic nose for Kidman, a long narrow one that radically transforms her. Who knew such a small change could make her unrecognizable?
Just don't get hung up on appearances. The true triumph here is Kidman's ability to reach into her own turmoil, the murk and angst of her own recent life, to express the tragic nature of Woolf's suicidal mental illness in the 1920s.
Moore's part of the drama takes place in the 1950s, and it's a strange echo of her emotional state in Far From Heaven, although the stories are quite different. Streep's story, set in the contemporary period, makes The Hours immediate to us, as an audience, and works with Philip Glass' brilliantly hypnotic, melancholic music score, to tie the parallel sagas together.
So, sure, call it a chick flick. Just don't dismiss it.
(This film is rated PG)
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