In 1923 England, writer Virginia Woolf is completing her novel "Mrs. Dalloway" while, in 1950s Los Angeles, a reader of that novel--a rather hapless pregnant housewife--is slowly unraveling in front of her husband and child (the latter of whom looks at her with a witness's eyes). A third story, and probably the strongest of the three, concerns a bisexual woman in New York City having difficulty pulling her emotions together to host a party for her ex, a writer, who is also bisexual and grappling with AIDS. Can a film be literate and intellectually stimulating but also uninvolving? I'm still not certain whether "The Hours", a UK-US co-production adapted from Michael Cunningham's novel, is filled with literary conceits or cinematic ones (it's nearly both when detailing the earliest activities of these women: when one lady looks into a mirror, another looks into a mirror--but not all three at the same time, that might be too much!). This trio of stories compliment each other in the most facetious ways; we're meant to stop and think, "Ah yes, I see the currents of time at work!" In the second plot, Julianne Moore becomes movie-frazzled over the baking of a birthday cake and had me grinding my teeth in exasperation (Moore's not-quite-there expression was beginning to seem like a rerun in 2002; the actress had worked through her repertoire of tender feelings and, I believe, cancelled out her own chances of winning an Oscar for "Far From Heaven"--she lost to Nicole Kidman, unrecognizable as Virginia Woolf in this picture). "The Hours" is about messy lives, but everything on-screen is clean and tidy; the tone is sedate, the arguments polite. Movies like this give good taste a bad name. *1/2 from ****
Review of The Hours
