The Hours (Widescreen Edition)

Rating:
Summary: luminous
Review: What an extraordinary movie with extraordinary performances by the three actresses, particularly Meryl Streep who is breathless and gorgeous in this film. If you don't 'get' this film, you may have no heart at all.

Rating:
Summary: Ultimately as artificial as Kidman's nose
Review: The Hours gained a lot of attention when it was released, mainly because of its A-list actresses (Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Miranda Richardson, and Toni Collette), Nicole Kidman's fake nose, and its high minded themes. It's an adaptation of the novel by Michael Cunningham, and the storyline is complex but basically it tracks Virginia Woolf writing "Mrs. Dalloway," a 1950s housewife who becomes obsessed with Mrs. Dalloway (the novel), and a 1990s career woman whose life resembles that of Mrs. Dalloway the party-planner. All three storylines take place in one day.
Nicole Kidman finally won an Oscar for her performance as the suicidal novelist Virginia Woolf. For this, she donned a fake nose, dyed her hair a mousy brown, and lowered her voice a few octaves. Her Virginia slouches, wears dowdy housedresses, and stares at dead animals. Kidman seems determined to carve out a niche for herself as an intelligent actress, and for this I admire her. However, ultimately her performance is unconvinving. She seems to fall into every "tortured artist" cliche -- she broods, she sniffles, she impulsively kisses people, and she stares out the windows, pen in hand. But her Virginia Woolf doesnt for a moment seem real or vital, just a mopey downer.
Julianne Moore plays Laura Brown, a depressed 1950s housewife, with a loving husband (John C. Reilly) and a young son. Moore is one of my favorite actresses, and she makes this confusing character very vulnerable and touching. However, the screenplay doesnt really flesh out Laura's motivations. Of the three lead actresses, I thought Moore was the least affected.
Meryl Streep is the "modern day" Clarissa Dalloway, a career woman who devotes her time to caring for Richard (Ed Harris), an ex lover who is dying of AIDS. Her day is spent planning a party for Richard. Strangely, her character is the most ordinary, yet Streep's performance is even more affected than Kidman's. You can see Streep switching gears -- ok now I'll smile through tears, now I'll look at the camera with my patented "tender" expression. She's supposed to be the overscheduled, overburdened contemporary woman, but her storyline was IMO not compelling enough for Streep's "acting class 101" antics.
And thus the problem with the whole movie -- in the end, it's as affected and artificial as Kidman's prosthetic nose. The movie is a little too in love with ennui. It's one of those movies where all of the characters are constantly on the verge of tears. Now there are plenty of movies which weave together seemingly unrelated storylines (Magnolia, Traffic), and of course the female weepie genre as well as the sapphic fantasy genre have been around since the beginning of moviemaking. But the best of these films have a vitality, vision, and wit that The Hours sorely lacks. Virginia, Laura, and Clarissa don't act, they POSE.
As a footnote, the supporting characters practically steal the movie. In particular, Toni Collette has a wonderful cameo as Laura's neighbor, Ed Harris is both pitiful and obnoxious as Richard.

Rating:
Summary: Do Not Miss This Film
Review: Stephen Daldry's film The Hours is among the best films of the last few years. The performances are very powerful from the whole cast, with Nicole Kidman and Julianne Moore shining the brightest. Daldry's move from stage to screen is proving to be great for film, receiving many nominations for both The Hours and Billy Elliot. He is possibly the only director that has recieved Academy Award nominations for best director for his first two movies.
The Hours may be a complicated movie, but no more difficult to understand than alot of great movies. The plot unfolds in three different people's lives during different decades. These stories interweve and you notice coincidences and connections in the characters more and more, which I will not give away. It is hard to compare this style of storytelling to other films, but It reminded me of Magnolia, although not as ambitious, and a little bit like Memento, but not backwards. These comparisons are slight, however, and The Hours is its own unique story as original and compelling as Magnolia or Memento. The movie does demand you to actually pay close attention and even figure things out for yourself, so may ot be for the casual viewer, but critisim due to the complexity of the story is fairly ridiculous when talking abut a film of such high quality and character developement. Please, do not miss this film.