As Horas

"The Hours" is not the easiest movie to describe. It portrays three women affected by Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway". The first is Woolf herself (Nicole Kidman) in the 1920's, slowly but surely descending into madness. The second is 1950's housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), beginning to feel unfulfilled with the suburban lifestyle. The third is present-day Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep), contemplating the future.

This is an interesting movie, although it certainly is a downer. Moore's role is particularly interesting, since she played almost exactly the same kind of character in "Far from Heaven", released around the same time. Also starring are Ed Harris, John C. Reilly, Claire Danes, and Jeff Daniels. Certainly worth seeing.

WARNING: This is an intensely depressing film and should not be seen by kids or the severely depressed. Additionally, if you just can't handle an unrelentingly dark and somber film, then you might want to look further.

"The Hours" is a very unusual film in that there completely separate but parallel stories that are interwoven throughout. While "Julie and Julia" did this with two, "The Hours" manages to do it with the lives of three women--three very, very, very depressed women who are suffering in silence.

I loved reading Claudio Carvalho's review. While short, it really summed up the film very well when "The Hours" was called 'A depressive and boring movie with outstanding cast'. I couldn't have said it any better. While there are three dynamite performances by three top actresses (one of which earned the Best Actress Oscar for this film), the film itself is all about depression and is a bit slow. Despite this, the writing IS good--and weaves together the disparate stories in a very unusual manner that is quite clever. So, it's a film I can respect but certainly didn't enjoy. After all, three ladies who have parallel stories who are fixated on suicide--this isn't exactly a comedy!! I see this film as one that is worth seeing for the performances and I can respect the way the film was constructed...but I just felt disconnected from the characters and didn't like the film. Well done but very inaccessible for most viewers--including me. If you are severely depressed, I sure DON'T recommend you watch it--it might just send you over the edge. Also, it's really NOT a film for kids...so think twice about having them watch it.

Even if there is no apparent reason to the anguish. This movies tells us the different stories of three women living in different times but united by the same thread: the difficulty to harmonize the world that is within their heads with the world outside which is so much different from the former. The first one is a real character: the famous British novelist Virginia Woolf whose novels depict characters so much like the other two and who has ended up by committing suicide at the age of 58 by drowning herself in a river. There is one of her most famous novels, "Mrs. Dalloway" that is over present in the movie since the novelist is precisely writing it at the time and feeling greatly moved and even anguished by that creative work. Of the other two women who lived much later, one is reading the book and the other one is called Mrs. Dalloway by a friend who is a poet and dying of AIDS, probably because he thought that she was much like the character in the novel. Suicide is also present in the other stories in a dramatic way. The image sequences in the movie are constantly crossing themselves, telling the three stories simultaneously thus underlining the similitude of the episodes in the life of the three women and in their states of mind. To appreciate this movie you must be familiar with Virginia Woolf's peculiar sensitivity so well expressed in her novels and the characters she created. This is not a realist movie and rather a movie where just like in her novels the most important feature is the stream of consciousness within the women's minds sometimes shown in acts or words and sometimes by the silence or their face's expressions. The movie direction and the actresses' performance is rather successful in making us feel in tune with it all.

In all honesty, as much as I liked Nicole Kidman's performance, the movie was made for me with Julianne Moore's. She made me so nervous, has me so much on edge, cause you didn't know what the hell was wrong with her. Did she have a crush on Toni Collette? Did she just have a breakdown? Does she want to burn the house down? To the movie's credit, you don't know what exactly is wrong, until the end. But as tense as it made me, I realized that in most movies you are clearly tipped off as far as who is angry, and why. This movie doesn't, and I didn't appreciate that until it was over.

Kidman was great, but I've always thought she had more talent than she was given credit for. Not many people could have made "To Die For" so convincing. Kudos to Nic for her career choices, post-divorce.

Streep, Ed Harris and Jeff Daniels were non-entities. I worship Streep and Ed Harris, but their part of the story didn't do a single thing for me. I kept waiting to see if Julianne was going to drive her car off a cliff. Without having seen all the nominees in Best Supporting Actress, I'd have to say another actress would have to go pretty damn far to impress me as much as she did. 8/10.

"The Hours" is an extremely intelligent movie. It's deep and sensitive and the script is something different for a change. The acting couldn't get any better. EVERY role was casted perfectly. I never really liked Nicole Kidman but she is a fantastic actress and at the moment she just chooses the right roles. She definitely deserved the Oscar. Juliane Moore is amazing, too. I wonder if there is any genre she can't do. And then, there's Meryl Streep. Will this woman ever stop being great? I mean after all the great movies she's been in in the 80's, she's still making exceptional films such as "Adaptation" and "The Hours", whereas other actors who were great 10 years ago pretty much lost it today *cough*Pacino*cough*DeNiro*cough, cough*. The director did a wonderful job and the score is another big plus of this movie. The haunting music underlines the depressing all around atmosphere and lets one feel how miserable these main characters are all the time. At times I felt like these women's sadness was explained too little, though. Maybe that's manly ignorance but I couldn't totally figure out why Juliane Moore's character was so depressed all the time. It was a little annoying that she never stopped crying and you couldn't tell why. I paid attention and I did try reading between the lines but that was a mystery to me. Probably just a personal problem. All in all I think this is the 2nd best movie of 2003's Oscar movies (1st being "The Pianist", 3rd "About Schmidt").