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The Hours

Just a pain?

THE HOURS
Director: Stephen Daldry
Miramax Films. Certificate 12A

This is a beautifully-crafted film about depression but its beauty is marred by its unremitting hopelessness.

It interweaves the stories of a single day in the lives of three women: Virginia Woolf (played by an unrecognisable Nicole Kidman) living with her husband Leonard in Richmond, Surrey in 1921; Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), an 'ordinary' housewife living a life of quiet desperation with her husband Dan and their young son in a Los Angeles suburb in 1951; and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a society editor living with her long-term partner, Sally, in New York, 2001.

Their lives are linked by the novel 'Mrs. Dalloway', which Virginia Woolf is writing, Laura Brown is reading and of which Clarissa is living out the plot. From the opening suicide to its reprise at the close, the film does little but cast doubt on there being any meaning to life.

Emptiness

Each of these women, along with many of the other characters, has to confront her own emptiness. Clarissa is preparing a big party for her friend who, though dying of AIDS, has won a famous prize for his poetry. He tells Clarissa: 'You're always giving parties to cover the silence ... I still have to face the hours; the hours after the party and the hours after that'. Laura Brown's neighbour asks her what Mrs. Dalloway is all about. Laura replies that she is a hostess and 'because she's confident, everyone thinks she's fine, but she isn't'. The neighbour crumples up in tears, but Laura has only sympathy and a kiss, with no real hope to share. Virginia Woolf faces up to the fact that her severe depression is never going to get any better, and in a powerful scene on Richmond station platform pleads with her husband to let her die. 'You live with the threat of my extinction', she cries. 'I have to live with it too'.

Though Clarissa in her emotional turmoil at one point cries out 'Jesus' in her turmoil, this is a film without a Saviour. There is only pain and the most comfort we will find is from fleeting moments of sexual pleasure which ultimately leave us hurt and unsatisfied. This film shows the truth of ancient wisdom: 'Everything is so weary and tiresome! No matter how much we see we are never satisfiedƒ History merely repeats itself' (Ecclesiastes 1.8,9). It does not show, though, that the pain of The Hours can only be borne in the light of The Day.

Trevor Stammers