THE HOURS (Stephen Daldry, 2002)

Reviewed: January 1st, 2003

Here's a new drinking game for ya: anytime a character in The Hours utters an intolerably pretentious line take a gulp. I tried to keep track of all the lines that would qualify, but seeing as I don't take notes during movies, I quickly lost count. You can even amend the rules to allow for the major annoyances to require two or three gulps: Meryl Streep muttering to herself, alone in a room, "Everything is wrong;" Meryl Streep informing a friend "I seem to be unraveling;" Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) telling her niece "When we die we go back to where we came from," promptly followed by her staring at a dead bird in extreme close-up; some character (I can't remember who) repeating again and again, for no other reason than to reinforce this movie's shallow and self-serving obsession with death, "It's alright to die. It's alright to die. It's alright to die;" Jeff Daniels informing us that, "When I left for Europe on the train that day I finally felt free" while Daldry dollies into an extreme close-up of his face. If you wanna get really hammered another variation could allow drinks during all the moments The Hour wallows in its own self-pity, though that might result in imminent kidney failure since there's hardly a scene here that isn't portentous and inane. Try this, instead, then: Take a drink every time a fatuous bit of connective tissue is employed. Those aren't in short supply, either, for The Hours is the kind of movie that, to show us three women living at different times during the 20th century are linked, has them repeating the same line in quick succession. This is the kind of movie that dissolves from one timeframe to another via two different characters staring out their respective windows. This is the kind of movie where a scene's conversation is inexplicably interrupted by a character cracking eggs in extreme close-up, then the same abrupt extreme close-up egg-cracking happens in another scene in another time period. This is the kind of movie that posits everyone who commits suicide, regardless of what era they're from, tells their lover, right before they die, "no two people could have been happier together," a line, which, while poetic in theory, doesn't make any fucking sense if you stop to think about it.

The Hours, easily one of the worst films I've seen all year, earnestly tries to suffocate its audience just because the three women protagonists are suffocating themselves. This plan's a miserable disaster because it ignores the essential fact that even the most devastating and downtrodden of movies require some kind of energy somewhere in their bone marrow to be worth watching. Typically self-deluded, if The Hours could talk it would claim to ultimately extol the virtues of life (there's a line about how someone has to die for others to appreciate life more), but nothing could be more inaccurate. This movie just lays on screen, literary to the point of literally lifeless, like the aforementioned dead bird, just waiting, begging, to commit suicide (as most of its characters at least attempt). I, for one, would just love to put it out of its misery because The Hours is a masochist and a phony, getting off on nothing more than its unrelenting dysphoria.

Perhaps The Hours' most impressive feat is to not only waste the collective talents of three of the finest actresses in cinema history, but to actually force two of them (Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep) into miscalculated performances by giving them rigidly underwritten roles (as an added bonus The Hours presents Ed Harris, one of our finest contemporary actors, embarrassingly overacting his dying AIDS victim right out the window, so to speak). Moore and Streep have trouble tossing out Hare's unbearably self-conscious lines and it sure doesn't help that Daldry's direction seems to have universally consisted of a single remark, which he apparently recorded and played into a PA system thirty times before each take: Be morose and unhappy! It also doesn't help that each one of the three storylines is, in theory, worthy of an entire feature (in fact Julianne Moore's strand as a stifled 1950s housewife was already made into a good feature this year; it's called Far From Heaven, you might have heard of it), but just as any of them build a trace of momentum, they're immediately shafted for a shift to the next. At least Kidman with her shockingly deeper voice is excellent (her role is the most fully formed), the tragedy of her mental sickness given surprising weight in the scene where she fights with her husband Leonard (the equally excellent Stephen Dillane) at the train station (certainly the film's highlight). The only other bit of relief comes from Claire Danes and her character, who briefly enters the picture seemingly determined to save the movie, set on breathing some life into the oppressive gloom. She tells her mom, Streep, that all her friends are sad. She tells her mom that her life's only shit if she believes it. What she's really saying is maybe Streep shouldn't mope around all day talking to herself about how bad everything is. Maybe she should, like, see a movie or, like, go to an amusement park or perhaps take a helicopter ride across Manhattan.

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