(Stephen Daldry, 2002)
This is strange. A biopic of the final days of Virginia Woolf intercut (rather overenthusiastically, it has to be said) with two entirely fictional stories apparently bearing no more meaningful a relation to Woolf than that they involve certain themes (e.g., lesbianism, illness, suicide) relevant to both her life and her novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The question is: why? A straightforward biopic of Woolf wouldn’t necessarily have been as interesting (especially in terms of narrative structure) but would at least have been possible to interpret. Similarly, a biopic of Woolf intercut with a screen adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway could have formed a more coherent whole (and offered some structural complexity, especially in those scenes where we see Woolf making decisions about the direction of the novel’s plot). But a biopic of Woolf intercut with two distinct yet thematically similar fictions? I understand the idea, but I really don’t see the justification for it. It just seems so arbitrary, like if Oliver Stone had intercut The Doors with an independent fictional piece about a man who happens to enjoy drug experimentation, writing quasi-mystical poetry, and getting his cock out.
The Hours is a decent, well-made, well-acted film. It just left me with a bad aftertaste; the sour flavour of unwarranted randomness.
The Hours @ IMDb
3 comments:
Frankly, my sweet boy, I'm surprised at your rather pedestrian expectations of how multiple narratives can be linked. Perhaps it has something to do with all that Tolkein you read over and over again. I don't see why you should find this so jarring - personally I thought it was an interesting way of examining women's roles through use of a recurring Mrs Dalloway theme. Admittedly, it was all a bit worthy and all a bit actory, and it certainly didn't feature any psychotic manifestations of killer puppies or a wrestling squid, but I thought it was alright!
My view of the multiple narratives in this film is precisely that they are not "linked" at all. They are merely intercut; and intercutting narratives is not the same thing as (successfully) linking them. Biography and fiction are two very different things, in terms of both style and content. There has to be some justification for constantly jumping between the two, otherwise the effect will indeed be jarring. That's why I mentioned the alternative possibility of intercutting a biopic of Woolf with a straightforward adaptation of Mrs. Dalloway. The justification for jumping between biography and fiction, in this case, would be the direct authorial relationship between the artist portrayed in the factual narrative and the artwork constituting the fictional narrative. Any relationship weaker than this would be hard to justify, in my opinion. The effect would be (as it is in The Hours) to trivialise the biographical strand.
I'm quite a fan of movies with several completely arbitrary disconnected storylines but I didn't get the hours either.
It's like someone made a straight biography of Virginia Woolf then some studio exec was all like, "yeah, it's good but it doesn't have enough Meryl Streep in it."
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