The Hours: why this film still hurts and still matters

Our most recent Film Group meeting, introduced by Tony Heaver, took on The Hours (2002) — a film many of us agreed is not an easy watch but that lingers long after the credits roll. For Tony, it’s a film he returns to a couple of times a year, and it’s easy to see why: this is cinema that wants to be felt, even if what it makes us feel is uncomfortable.

Directed by Stephen Daldry — whose background as an actor and theatre director shows in the film’s careful staging — The Hours is based on Michael Cunningham’s 1998 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. The screenplay was written by David Hare, another writer deeply rooted in theatre, which perhaps explains why the film often feels like a series of intimate, interlocking chamber pieces.

At its heart are three women, from three different periods, all linked by Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. The film (like the novel) is structured around a single day in each of their lives, and is bookended by Woolf’s suicide — an opening that immediately sets the tone for a film steeped in themes of dissatisfaction, mental illness, and the search for meaning.

We begin with Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman in the role that won her the Oscar — “the nose won the Oscar,” as someone wryly suggested of the prosthesis she wore for the role). Living in Richmond and struggling with severe mental illness, Woolf resents what she experiences as imprisonment there and has a strained relationship with her protective husband Leonard, who for some came across as deeply caring and for others as a domestic tyrant. We see her drafting Mrs Dalloway, acutely aware of time passing — marked in the novel by the striking of Big Ben — and already haunted by the idea of death.

The second strand follows Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) in 1950s America, a woman seemingly blessed with material comfort, a kind and supportive husband and a growing young family. Yet Laura is profoundly dissatisfied, isolated and struggling to live up to her domestic roles — something her husband, though well-meaning, is incapable of understanding. Reading Mrs Dalloway, she checks into a hotel with the intention of killing herself, before ultimately choosing to live, though not the life laid out for her. After the birth of her second child, she leaves her family. Her line, “I chose life,” sparked a lot of discussion: what kind of life and at what cost?

Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), the third woman, lives in contemporary New York. A publisher, she is preparing a party — like Mrs Dalloway — for the love of her life, Richard, a poet dying of AIDS. Their relationship is complex and painful: though gay, Richard has always kept Clarissa emotionally bound to him, even as she has built a life and a long-term relationship with Sally. Clarissa has nursed Richard through his illness, but he is a difficult, often unlikeable character and we never see him in his prime — making her lifelong devotion harder for some of us to understand.

One particularly touching scene comes when Clarissa speaks to her daughter about happiness. She recalls a single perfect moment with Richard in their youth, when he called her “Mrs Dalloway”, and realises that this fleeting memory is what she has clung to ever since. Outwardly capable and in control, Clarissa is quietly coming apart beneath the surface, mirroring Mrs Dalloway’s own frantic party preparations.

The film’s interwoven references reward close attention. Richard dies in the same way as Septimus in Mrs Dalloway. There are recurring motifs, often appearing in threes — eggs appearing in kitchens across all three stories, three illicit kisses, three lesbian relationships  — and names that echo Woolf’s novel. Philip Glass’s score, though criticised by some on release, was widely felt by our group to be perfectly suited, binding the stories together with a sense of inevitability and emotional momentum.

Much of the discussion focused on mental health, particularly women’s mental health. Historically, as we noted, men were allowed to be “mad or bad,” while women were labelled mad, bad or hysterical — their distress reduced to physical weakness rather than recognised as an expression of a rich inner life. Laura’s story was especially compelling in this regard: a 1950s woman who is part of a wider, often overlooked wave of female mental illness following the war, when women who had worked, coped with trauma and held responsibility were expected to return quietly to their domestic boxes. Her eventual reappearance late in the film — not glamorous but as a librarian with a “life of the mind” — divided opinion but worked for many of us.

We also wrestled with an uncomfortable question: are these characters selfish or are they ill? They want for nothing materially and appear to be surrounded by loving people, yet each is profoundly unhappy. The fact that the writer, screenwriter and director are all men, while the central characters are women, added another layer to this debate.

Despite its difficulty — and the shocking nature of its suicide scenes — The Hours is a film that stays with you. As one comment neatly summed it up: “If a film makes you feel bad, so be it.” There is value in tragedy and strong emotion, and in stories that confront mental health head-on rather than smoothing it over.

This is a film we’ll remember — one that sticks in the mind, cuts deep and continues to provoke thought long after the discussion ends.

Next meeting: Wednesday, 4 February at 8 pm at The Burleigh Arms

Film: Hugo (Martin Scorsese) — an adventure movie set in Paris.