Reaction to "The Hours"

I had no idea what I was expecting from The Hours, but I held out the hope that it wouldn't be as imminently depressing as Mrs. Dalloway. The movie forced me to look at some very real and very intense themes regarding the nature of the human experience.

The film follows the lives of three women, all in different time periods: Clarissa Vaughn, Laura Brown, and Virginia Woolf. Clarissa, who resides in modern-day New York, wants to throw a celebratory party for her friend Richard, who is afflicted with AIDs. Laura is an unhappy, pregnant housewife in the 1950s, who struggles with the will to live and conformity. The movie covers Virginia Woolf as she wrestles with her mental illness while also trying to write her novel.

The first thing I noticed were the parallels between movie Clarissa and book Clarissa. Both of them are attempting to throw a party. Even though their reasons for doing so are different, I saw that both of them were still attempting to distract each other from their current lives. In the book, Clarissa says that she's throwing parties as an "offering" of sorts, and iterates that without her parties she doesn't really have much. (She doesn't know anything about those "equators.") In The Hours, Clarissa isn't officially romantically involved with Richard (who is a completely different character, and is most closely compared to Septimus), but is with Sally Lester ("Seton"). Despite already having a partner, she shares a tense and passionate kiss with Richard. When Richard continually refers to her as "Mrs. Dalloway," she feels snubbed; he's just pointing out the fact that Clarissa is using him as an escape and distraction from her own life.

There were three scenes that are I thought exemplified amazing cinematography. The first two were the beginning and ending scenes, where the opening and finishing lines of Virginia Woolf's suicide letter are read and Woolf slowly lets herself become engulfed by river rapids. Out of context, the scenes are still good, but I couldn't help but be completely struck by ending line, having actually watched the rest of the movie: "Always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours." It's a telling quote, presumably referring to how all of the women are connected through the years, and how love (or the lack thereof) was an important component to the women's plights.

The third scene that overwhelmed me was about Laura. She had dropped her son (a tiny, adorable Richard!) off, and had gone to a hotel to read Mrs. Dalloway and contemplate whether or not she would take her own life. She's lying on her bed, gazing at the bottle of pills next to her, when water rises up (sidenote: I was totally convinced for a second that it was CGI) from the sides of the bed and overwhelms her. She gasps awake after this, indicating that she didn't actually pass away by mysterious natural circumstances, but the relation to the book is interesting. Woolf often mentions "diving" and "plunging" in Mrs. Dalloway, and the imagery of water seems to suggest a lack of control and boundaries... but the opposite is true in the movie. Both women, Laura and Woolf herself, are portrayed as calmly succumbing to their fates; Woolf with the river, and Laura in the hotel. They both appear completely in control, despite the inner turmoil they're actually experiencing.

If someone has read Mrs. Dalloway, the film can give the reader food for thought to build on what they are already familiar with. Overall, The Hours is infinitely grim, yet satisfying.