The Hours

“Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” This is how Virginia Woolf’s novel, translated by Dezso Tandori and published in Budapest the year of my birth by Helikon, begins. And with these words begins one of the best movies of the past years, in my opinion, directed by Stephen Daldry based on a screenplay by David Hare. The movie is an adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway.

The movie is not filled with Mr. Cunningham’s presence. It is Virginia Woolf who emerges from every sentence, every uncovered taboo, and every metaphorical situation. We listen to Woolf’s words written and spoken. This movie is about a lot of things that happy people don’t want to know and the unhappy ones would like to forget about.

Three well known women – Mery Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore – play three very different women in the film. Streep is a New York-based editor in the 90s, who is called Mrs. Dalloway by her best friend, and whose first name is Clarissa, just like Mrs. Dalloway’s. Moore’s character is a housewife in 1950’s America, who is reading Woolf’s novel, and Kidman is the writer herself writing the novel Mrs. Dalloway.

Mrs. Dalloway is about one day in life of a higher class woman in London. We know her every thought, we know where she is going and also what others think of her. The writer in the movie argues that someone has to die in the novel so that the others will cherish life more. First, the heroine herself was supposed to die, but later the mentally unstable young man will kill himself, leaving his young wife behind. Woolf in her own life also chooses suicide, filling the pockets of her coat with stones and walking into the river, leaving war ridden Europe and her Jewish husband behind. But first, she finishes her novel.

Julianne Moore’s character, Laura Brown, lives like many wanted to live in the USA in the 1950’s: she has an ideal husband, a car, a beautiful son, a nice house, in a suburb and a second child on the way. Her husband brings fresh flowers every morning for his wife before he leaves for work. But in spite of all of this, Laura Brown is not happy. On this particular day, she takes her son to a neighbor and despite his protests, she leaves him there and goes to a hotel room to die. But before the water closes over her bed, just like over Virginia Woolf, she realizes: She cannot kill her unborn child. She promises herself, that as soon as the second child is born, she will leave her family and start her life over. And that is exactly what she does.

Meryl Streep’s character, Clarissa Vaughn, buys the flowers herself the morning of her best friend’s and ex-boyfriend’s celebratory party. Richard, Ed Harris, is a well-known poet, who at this point is very ill with AIDS and who calls Clarissa “Mrs. Dalloway”. “I stayed alive for you until now.” says Richard. “It’s time for you to let me go.” But Clarissa cannot let go, because, as she confesses to her daughter, the happiest moment of her life was with Richard. She thought from that moment on, that happiness would grow, but she was wrong – it all got worse. At the end of the day– after Richard jumps out of the window – Clarissa realizes that she was mistaken: her present life is not unhappy and empty. She kisses her partner of many years as an acknowledgement of this, but the partner has no idea what is going on.

The story ends with Laura Brown coming to her son, Richard’s, funeral and staying over at Clarissa’s. Clarissa meets the evil mother who abandoned her child, but who does not seem so evil at all. Every piece of the puzzle falls into place.

Michael Cunningham’s novel brings four basic issues, still taboos in the 21st century, to the spotlight.

The first is the question of suicide. How long must a person live if her/his life is only suffering? When has one the right to say: �I can’t take it anymore’ and die? Who are we living for? What is happiness? Whose life is it?

The second taboo is mental illness. Not everybody who is mentally unstable is crazy. There are those who are depressed or those who have schizophrenia, but our society has not learned to live with these people, and would like to lock them up, separate them from the rest of the population that is momentarily more mentally stable. Are we denying other realities than our own? And in connection with the first taboo – Which is harder: to be sick or to live with the sick person? How long is it a must to live with one’s illness?

The third taboo is the role of a classical housewife. Laura Brown cannot take the role of a housewife, she struggles to be a wife and mother, and she would rather die than keep trying. She chooses life, her own life, over her own death, which is only possible if she leaves her family after her second child is born. Her first born will never be able to cope with the fact that his mother did leave him in the end. But this is the only way Laura Brown can stay alive. Not all women are able to be wives and mothers.

The fourth is the issue of sexuality. It is known that Virginia Woolf was inspired by women – her novel Orlando has been called the longest love letter ever written, and was inspired by a woman. Laura Brown kisses her woman neighbor passionately and Clarissa lives with her female partner and daughter fathered by a sperm bank. Cunningham successfully implies that sexuality, despite what many want us to believe, was never one dimensional. Bisexuality and homosexuality are not inventions of the 20th century, only people can be openly what they are in a few modern cities and countries of today. Virginia Woolf could not talk openly about her love of other women, although she did it in subtle ways anyway. Laura Brown could not talk about the kiss, not even to the woman she kissed. But Clarissa Vaughn had the possibility and choice to live her life freely the way she wanted and her environment accepted her the way she really was.

It is possible that Virginia Woolf would not be too thrilled with Nicole Kidman’s sometimes glowing fake nose, but maybe she would be happy about this sensitive and brave movie, because Woolf was a brave woman. On the Oprah Show, Nicole Kidman has said that the nose, the clothes and the cigarettes helped her to form her interpretation of Virginia Woolf. Meryl Streep said on the same show, answering the question about coping with being a mother and a busy working actress, that she is very tired. She also said that she thinks the movie is about “despair and the desire to live.” I would add that it is also about despair and the desire to love.

By unfortunate promotional timing, the same time as The Hours, two other movies came out in the US. In Adaptation, Meryl Streep excels as a New York-based editor of The New Yorker. In Far From Heaven, Julianne Moore’s character is a housewife in the 1950’s suburbs. Since both movies and both actresses in them are brilliant, it is really only Nicole Kidman’s performance in The Hours that pleasantly surprised all, especially because many were skeptical about her being able to pull off Virginia Woolf in the first place.

The movie The Hours is like a silk scarf: it is soft, cold, but strong and beautiful, and it tears easily. It is made like this by the music, the lighting and the beauty of women; the unbearable heaviness of being, the unsolvable situations in life, the secrecy of emotions, shame, the art of pretence, falsehood and pose. There is no ideology in this movie – it is simply and honestly deeply human. And many will not like this. And many will.

When I first saw this movie, in December of 2002, the theatre was filled half by men and half by women. Not one eye stayed dry. They should have given all of us a packet of tissues with the ticket!

Miriam Molnar

(Published in Kalendarium, a traditional almanac, in Hungarian in Slovakia, 2003)