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Life begins one morning as certainly as it will end in death, and in between, the hours. And it is these hours in between that are most dreaded by Virginia, Laura and Clarissa, for it is when they find themselves confronting the mundane, the every day, every single detail of which constitutes the reality of their unhappiness.
I first watched The Hours, a movie based on the 1998 novel by Michael Cunningham, when it was released in 2002, and back then, I remember being impressed by the seamless storytelling. It takes a fantastic storytelling skill to weave three different stories into one grand narrative without appearing contrived or forced. Spanning three generations, The Hours is a story of three women and Mrs. Dalloway — Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel about a middle-aged, party-throwing high-society woman in the person of Clarissa Dalloway in post-World War I England — and how the novel becomes a reflection of their own existential state (Virginia Woolf), how reading it inspires them to “choose life” outside of the suffocating, conservative 1950s American suburbs (Laura Brown), and finally, how the novel’s characters and story come alive through eponymous people in 2001 New York (Clarissa Vaughn), all set in one day. “A woman’s day in a single day. And in that one day, her whole life,” Virginia begins her novel.
Ten years later, I watched the movie again and found myself awed by the coming together of the movie’s elements perfectly, not least of which are the fluid storytelling and superb acting, characterized by restraint and nuances, by the three main actors as well as the supporting cast. Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep have all done an excellent job bringing to life, respectively, the characters of Virginia, the English writer suffering from a mental sickness and struggling to be free from what she perceives to be an incarceration in the “quiet” British suburbs by her husband and doctors; of Laura, a housewife and mother whose unhappiness with the typical life that she leads is barely contained; and of Clarissa, the modern-day Mrs. Dalloway, who, like the 20th century novel’s character, wakes up in the morning with a party to plan, and then gets overwhelmed by people from her past who unwittingly make her confront her own sadness. The movie’s supporting characters led by Stephen Dillane as Virginia’s husband, Leonard and Ed Harris as Clarissa Vaughn’s AIDS-infected and mentally disturbed writer friend and former lover, Richard, gave fine performances, too.
Seeing the movie again with additional 10 years on me has made me notice something else, too: Central to each of the stories is the subject of death in its many forms. The movie, in fact, opens with Virginia’s suicide scene where she fills her pockets with stones and walks into the lake to drown. Physical death is resorted to (or at least attempted) by the characters in the movie when “trying to cover the sadness by throwing parties” (as Richard accuses of Clarissa) is no longer enough, or when the aching dullness and flatness of an unwanted life “was death” unto itself (Laura), or when one no longer wishes to fight a mental disease but instead wishes to succumb to a liberating nothingness (Virginia).
The battle between the mundane and the existential rages on quietly (Laura goes through her typical daily routine while planning a birthday celebration for her husband; Clarissa does the same while planning Richard’s writing prize celebration party), and comes to the surface occasionally when the banal details of the every day could no longer put a tight lid on thoughts and emotions buried somewhere deep.
The confrontation scene between Leonard and Virginia at the train station to London provides a catharsis to this simmering battle:
Virginia: I’m living in a town I have no wish to live in. I am living a life I have no wish to live.
Leonard: Virginia, we have to go home now. Nelly’s cooking dinner. It’s just our obligation to eat dinner.
Virginia: I wish for your sake, Leonard, that I could be happy in this quietness. But if it’s a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death. You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.
Eighteen years after penning the novel that inspired this movie, Virginia did choose death, a choice that one of her characters in the novel also took as “an effort to preserve the purity of happiness.” “I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have been,” Virginia writes to Leonard on her suicide note, and in the movie, a soft admonition for Leonard and those who find that the only way that they can preserve life is by — quite ironically — avoiding it altogether: “To look life in the face. Always to look life in the face. And to know it for what it is at last. To know it, to love it for what it is. And then to put it away.”