The Hours

For me, watching The Hours in class was an interesting experience. It gave a different perspective on Mrs. Dalloway, which was definitely nice to have, but I can't say that I enjoyed it as much as the book. I think that although splitting the movie into three distinct parts had its advantages, it also meant that the movie lost a lot of what made Mrs. Dalloway so great.

To start with the good, the scenes with Virginia Woolf were very well-done. I felt like they added a lot to how I thought about the novel. Having the context in which a book is written (or any work of art is made) can make you look back on what you've read and see much more clearly what the author was thinking and to some extent what they intended. That can help you get a much deeper understanding of a work, and help you understand a little better how the author was able to write the way they did. I do think it's important that that context comes after you read the book, because that allows you to go back and think about it again, instead of distracting you with all the things you know about the author while you're trying to read it, and maybe making you see connections that aren't there.

I'm a little less excited about the New York scenes. To me, they felt like a more-or-less straight retelling of a very good novel that cut out a lot of what made it so good - namely, the extremely detailed and observant style. That's not a knock against the filmmakers, since they did a very good job overall, but cutting down a novel like Mrs. Dalloway into a third of a 2 hour movie without dropping non-critical elements is pretty much impossible. Still, it's impossible to shake the feeling that the plot moves very quickly compared to the fairly slow pace of the book, and doesn't allow for the same subtlety and focus on different personalities as the book. Even though the modern setting is supposed to help us relate more to the characters, too little time devoted to too many people makes it hard to care for them much as characters.

The scenes where Laura Brown featured left me more conflicted. I liked the characters and got quickly attached to them, especially the lovable-yet-terrifying Dan. I think that even if the rest of that part of the movie had been boring, Dan's borderline psychopathic speech about why he married Laura would have been enough to make me appreciate it. Together with the excellent acting by Julianne Moore as a miserable housewife and the excellent way her near-suicide attempt was handled, I think the 50's section of the movie was very strong on its own right. The problem is, I don't necessarily know if it was important enough to the movie as a whole to justify its inclusion. Considering a lot of the problems with the New York scenes came from brevity and a very fast-moving plot, you have to wonder if all that set up to the plot twist of Laura being Richard's mother was really worth it.

The way I see it, there are two things that the 50's scenes are in the movie for: to give a back story for  Richard that serves to explain why he's been traumatized to the point of Septimosity, and to drive home some of the points Mrs. Dalloway makes about the role of the housewife in a setting that's more immediately familiar to most viewers - and to a character who seems to react more like most people probably expect they would in that role. To be honest, I think that the explanation of Richard's trauma is a little bit unnecessary. He gets enough piled on him between off-screen bitterness over losing Clarissa and being diagnosed with HIV at the height of his career that mommy issues aren't necessarily the only (or even the best) explanation for his suicide. As for the second role, I do think that's a valuable and interesting contribution. But it also makes me wonder - if we already have a character that brings some of the issues Clarissa has into a more modern context, do we really need the New York retelling? The way I see it, to really get as much of the full, detail-rich feel of Mrs. Dalloway into a 2 hour movie as possible, you might need to cut out one of the three storylines, or at least devote much less time to one of them. In that case, I'd have to go with Laura's story as the more interesting and thematically compelling choice than the straight retelling of the novel presented by the New York option, at least as someone who's already read Mrs. Dalloway.