Book Review

My habit lately has been to pile upon my nightstand a veritable Baskin Robbins of leisure reading material: essays, short stories, fiction, memoirs. It’s easier to keep the energy going when I’ve got a wide array of plots and themes running through my mind.

Last week I decided I wanted more. I wanted a contemporary tale of a lesbian in New York. But I also wanted to get a taste of history, to dive into — as I often do — a story about the crafting of a story. A writer.

Oh, and I desired to live a day in the life of a 1940s housewife.

I wanted all these things. I read “The Hours.” It delivered.

Michael Cunningham weaves together the tales of three women, encapsulating the entire novel as a single day in each of their lives. There is the writer, Virginia Woolf, as she takes on the task of writing her novel “Mrs. Dalloway.”

There is the reader, Laura Brown, who finds escaping into “Mrs. Dalloway” doesn’t quench her desire to be something more than ordinary.

And there is the modern-day version of Mrs. Dalloway — the book publisher living the stereotypical jumbled but enjoyable New York lifestyle.

The reader sails from chapter to chapter, visiting with each of the women, knowing there is some connection that Cunningham won’t immediately point out. But this is not “Magnolia,” and these characters do not necessarily wander in and out of one another’s lives without knowing it. “The Hours” is about the experiences of reading, writing, living, dying. Simple things, really — but united via complex storytelling.

Though weaving these stories together must have proven a daunting task, reading the book is not. Cunningham eases into the intertwined tales with grace, and proves that he can maintain a pace that is engaging.

Despite utilizing the device of intertwining three lives to tell one true story, Cunningham is still able to present an intriguing plot, letting the characters divulge the sordid details of their own connections from past lives. Clarissa spends her day planning an ill-fated party for her friend Richard, who turns out to be a former lover. Both Clarissa and Richard went on to same-sex relationships, though Richard’s ended before the book begins. Now his struggle is with AIDS, and Clarissa’s is with grappling to recall what went wrong, what led them away from one another in the bedroom but not as friends.

Laura is unhappy, and she knows it. The source of her discontent is harder to target, as she assures herself several times it is not that she hates her husband, her home or her child, Richie. It is still undeniable, though, that she hates something about the vanilla life she leads. Kissing a girlfriend and escaping for an afternoon to the solitary of a strange hotel room mark the beginning of what develops into a haunted life.

It is Laura’s attachment to “Mrs. Dalloway” and Woolf that connect her into the larger scheme of “The Hours.”

Those not familiar with Woolf’s daunting collection of work need not fear, for there is nothing so technically involving in the reading of “The Hours” that will detract from enjoying it sans a working knowledge of “Mrs. Dalloway.” Initially, I imagined that the Woolf chapters would be the least engaging, as they were bound to a certain degree of nonfiction, unlike the other two tales.

While Cunningham explains his method for creating this fictional day in the life of another very real writer, he does not abandon his toolbox in any of the writing he serves up in the novel. That is, easing through Woolf’s day was as simple as gliding through Laura’s and Clarissa’s. I was not, after all, afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Other readers shouldn’t be either, particularly those with an interest in seeing Paramount’s new film based upon the book. There is a reason after all, this book won the Pulitzer Prize.

“The Hours” is a short read, clocking in at fewer than 250 pages, though I’ll avoid forcing out a nasty pun about how many hours it will take to read … well, you see where this is going.

Film Review

Henry David Thoreau once wrote that all men lead lives of quiet desperation. In Stephen Daldry’s film “The Hours,” the film takes that notion and applies it to women, suggesting that they live lives twice as desperately and four times as quietly. It may sound convincing that a film based on such principles makes for gripping drama. As skeptic viewers will discover, it certainly does not.

“The Hours” is based on Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel, depicting three women as parallel characters connected by Virginia Woolf. The first is Woolf herself, played in the film by Nicole Kidman. The second, played by Julianne Moore, is a 1950s-era housewife named Laura Brown. The last is Clarissa Vaughan, played by a perpetually smug-looking Meryl Streep.

The movie depends primarily on establishing the three protagonists as parallel characters, but fails in establishing any real connections between them. Woolf writes “Mrs. Dalloway,” which Brown reads, and Vaughan is referred to as Mrs. Dalloway by her AIDS-stricken friend (Ed Harris). Woolf and Brown both contemplate suicide, and Vaughan encounters it, but they hardly share meaningful links. Without any visual motifs or behavioral similarities, the three characters share little, and the narrative never really narrows itself to one story.

The acclaim for the film is dependent largely on the acting within the film. Kidman totally transforms herself, becoming unrecognizable in appearance, voice or tone. She disappears within the character of Woolf and keeps her performance from spinning out of control. Moore is also excellent in her sparse time on screen, keeping her pain lingering near the surface so only she and a wary audience can capture it. Streep, on the other hand, offers what may very well be her worst performance. She occupies the screen like she’s paying rent there, and emotes her way through an agonizing, yet critically-acclaimed performance. Since she simply cannot help but be nominated for mediocre performances. Streep will certainly get a nod from the Academy for this, her most mediocre performance in years.

Even worse, the story utilizes her as its primary character, pinning the film’s entire emotional payoff on Streep and the cast of stereotypes and extended cameos that whirl around her. Harris makes do excellently with his dying-artist role that he already played in “Pollock,” but Jeff Daniels is agonizing in his role as Harris’ ex-boyfriend, and Allison Janney makes for a quite unconvincing partner for Streep. Even though there are three scenes of women kissing each other, the two characters who are defined as stock lesbians seem by far the least intimate. The rest of the supporting cast make the most of their time on screen, but cannot provide enough force to make the characters connected or the film meaningful.

There has been much written about the lack of quality roles for women in Hollywood. Though the gushing of critics seems to indicate that “The Hours” is proof that there is hope, in a matter of years, it will soon stand as living proof of that condition. It is a film about women written by a man, in this case, twice over, in the novel by Michael Cunningham and in the screenplay by David Hare. That proves to be a fatal flaw.”The Hours” will almost certainly win Oscars and deserve at least two for Glass and Kidman, but even more certainly it will become a mere obscurity in the years to come.

If all people already lead lives of quiet desperation, there is certainly no need to add to it by enduring “The Hours.” Real human desperation seems far less like an emotional violation.