The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002)

Based on Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Hours has a pretty big problem at its core. Two stories spin out from an account of Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman in an Oscar-winning performance) writing Mrs. Dalloway and, like so many films about authors, neither screenwriter David Hare nor director Stephen Daldry provide much insight into Woolf's style or even the toil of writing. This fatal-for-some shortcoming is compounded by a further conceit dictating that each story plays out over a single day (despite a brief depiction of Woolf's suicide which frames the film). Would I could pump out even a blog post within 24 hours.

But if you can forgive these limitations (and again, I grant that it will be impossible for many viewers), The Hours is surprisingly moving, in more ways than one, for a project that threatens the most ponderous Oscar-mongering. The other two stories concern a housewife (Julianne Moore) consumed with soon-to-be-specified dread in 1950s Los Angeles and an editor (Meryl Streep) in contemporary Manhattan. Woolf's limning of the quotidian passions and disappointments of lesbian life filter through the latter tales for the kind of trenchantly observed film for grown-ups that seems to have retreated from theatres to the big streamers today. Best of all, Daldry keeps things brisk. Before one trajectory becomes too crusty, he switches to another for a productive middlebrow mental workout. That's no insult. The Hours allows us to think of lesbianism transhistorically and casts welcome doubt on contemporary life as always already more enlightened.

There are some crass moments such as when Moore's housewife bolts up from her attempted suicide and proclaims, "I can't!" The fact she did not, in fact, go through with it would have conveyed that information to us quite efficiently. But overall, the game time performances power over the few low points. And for all the accolades thrown at the three principals, the greatest performance here is owned by an unrecognizable-by-me Toni Collette as a fellow housewife trying to sublimate her desire for Moore. In just one scene, she motors through lust, containment, anger, propriety, resignation all while suggesting possibilities for different futures than her tract-home existence allows. 

Fleet, yielding, with a drive unexpected in such prestige items, The Hours is the rare kind of film to give middlebrow a good name.

The Hours: A-minus