The Hours
One of the strangest, meta-moments of reading Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a moment where one of the characters, Clarissa Vaughn, believes she sees Meryl Streep walking on the streets of New York. In Stephen Daldry’s 2002 adaptation, Streep plays Clarissa Vaughn. It is a fittingly reflexive moment, since The Hours is a novel and film concerned with how people are connected through artistic roots and the power of literature in bridging people’s lives. She is one of the three women, separated by generation, connected by Virginia Woolf’s classic Mrs. Dalloway.
The first woman is Woolf herself (Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her portrayal), as she struggles to write her classic novel about a woman preparing to host a party while dealing with her own troubles. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is a housewife who is reading Woolf’s novel in 1949, as she plans her husband’s birthday party, while dealing with her own existential crisis. Finally, in a modern day setting, Clarissa prepares a party for her friend, a poet living with AIDS played by Ed Harris.
Screenwriter David Hare accentuates the storylines’ significance to each other by cutting between them, breaking down the time with more clarity and dramatic power than Cunningham does in his novel, which jumps between the stories less frequently. As a result, Daldry’s film moves the audience as we discover the lengths to which these characters share the same needs, desires and destinies. The film improves on its literary pretensions by intertwining the stories together with depth, grace and purpose.
