MOVIE REVIEW: THE HOURS
If you are young, and the dew is still on your petals, and even if those petals are beginning to curl a little around the edges, but, in any case, you are still not old, you can look at The Hours as the elegant piece of work that it is. For you, the grief and pain of the ruined lives of three women are pure literature on film. But unless you, a comparatively young person, have had a far-too-early dose of life's real pain and real grief, you will feel it only in the abstract. Yes, you may come out of the theatre, thoughtful, even somber. While making dinner, you could even wonder if you threw away your life on the man. Perhaps you should have a room of your own and, curled up in a sagging chintz chair, write novels with a pen you dip in ink. And he can damn well heat up some soup. Have hope. The mood will pass.
At my age, an hour and a half of relentless sorrow, grief, madness, regret and ruination, and Virginia Woolf, with a stone in her pocket, walking into the waters to die is overkill.
What kept me from bolting, was the acting. So breathlessly good that I am fighting a need to gush. The three women--Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman--then, Ed Harris, as an ex-husband dying of AIDS, all exceeding themselves. Boredom is in the details, but, if you must, the plot and credits--termpaperish--are all over the net.
Nicole Kidman in her prosthetic nose becomes Virgina Woolf. I knew Nicole Kidman was a good actor. I didn't know she was a great actor.
Being a surfacy kind of person, I studied the sets so intently that I may have lost the thread. Nicole Kidman in the intellectual-looking English country house that I deserve, Julianne Moore, a fifties woman, in a sterile, too-clean California house, Ed Harris in a dying poet's cold-water loft, Meryl Streep in an apartment that could belong to Mia Farrow in a Woody Allen movie. Only smaller.
The truth is I should have gone one entrance over and popped in on About Schmidt. But you shouldn't.
9:49:51 AM 
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