"Wow", huh. I woulda said it this way:
The Hours is a brilliantly austere, emotionally nuanced masterpiece riddled with suicidal musings and homosexual propaganda. Two roles stand out. From behind her now-famous prosthetic nose, Nicole Kidman brings a calculated subtlety and convincing vagueness to Virginia’s depression. Julianne Moore loses herself behind the sad eyes of an overwhelmed housewife. The interweaving of Virginia, Laura and Clarissa’s lives is intricate and fascinating. At first you feel like you need a scorecard to keep track of everyone, but slowly you begin to notice that clues to their continuity are being doled out with dialogue, visual motifs and even in the characters’ costumes. When Laura’s shoe falls to the floor as she contemplates taking the pills, you remember that rushing water scooped one of Virginia’s shoes from her limp foot as she succumbed to the cold river’s grasp. As Clarissa morosely scrapes uneaten party food into a trash can, you see in your mind images of Laura angrily dumping her failed mess of a birthday cake. The Hours is obsessed with ambiguity, conundrum, paradox and incongruity. It’s a literary buff’s dream that has leapt from the printed page to the big screen. It digs for answers to some of life’s most perplexing dilemmas, and then turns the dream into something of a nightmare when it comes up empty. Laura confesses that she’s trapped between her family (a circumstance that makes her want to kill herself) and her freedom (a choice that means deserting everyone who loves her). Virginia tells her husband that she longs "to look life in the face, and know it for what it is." For her, it is death.
What author Michael Cunningham and director Stephen Daldry have done is take Virginia Woolf’s well-known feminist leanings and her self-destructive moods and elevate them to a more vivid and culturally accessible level. (Thankfully, the film isn't being marketed to teens, most of whom won't be drawn to the film's ponderous subject matter and middle-aged broodings anyway.) Decades ago, when he first read Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham instantly recognized "the beauty and the density and the music of the language." He remembers thinking, "Woolf was doing with language something like what Jimi Hendrix was doing with a guitar." Stephen Daldry pays the compliment forward by bringing Cunningham’s meditations to theaters. The result can serve as a creative launching pad for complex ruminations about life, death, depression, mental illness, sexuality and how our choices create our destinies.Intense images of suicide and same-sex passion can stir in us emotions that will drive us away from the Lord, rather than serving as reminders—as they should—of where our paths ought not to lead. Left unscrutinized, The Hours communicates that suicide may be justifiable (even beneficial), and that homosexual attractions are natural, pursuable instincts.
But maybe "wow" sums it up better....<g> |
