By Claude Mills, Staff ReporterIF YOU have not taken your Prozac, I do not recommend that you see The Hours. It is a tale of suicidal tendencies which the goat-rope-from-a-tree people may enjoy with its central theme of self-annihilation as a bonafide response to melancholy.
The Sylvia Plath sensibilities aside, The Hours is a big-budget, all-star art movie with a gay feminist agenda that the highbrow intellectuals will pretend that they love. Most of the main characters are decidedly gay, or heading in that direction, with lots of smart, sensitive women deeply in love with other women.
The story unfolds in a fluid, time-tripping triptych of three eras involving three interlocking stories and how they affect the lives of three different women.
Each woman is joined to the other like stylish links in a chain, unaware that the power of a single great work of literature is irrevocably altering their lives. First there is Virginia Woolf (played by Nicole Kidman) who is trapped in the hell of a 1920s London suburbia, battling insanity as she begins to write her first great novel, Mrs. Dalloway.
Over two decades later, we meet Laura Brown (played by Julianne Moore), a wife to a doormat, doting husband (played by the typecast John C. Reilly again) and a mother in LA, who is reading the novel, Mrs. Dalloway, and contemplating making some drastic changes in her life.
Then there is Clarissa Vaughan (played by Meryl Streep), a gay woman who is hopelessly in love with her gay best friend, Richard (played by Ed Harris), who is dying of AIDS, and who often refers to her as 'Mrs. Dalloway' because of the parallels in her life with the Woolf character. A really lovely formula for melancholy, isn't it?
You will watch in fascination as their stories intertwine and climax in a moment of shared clarity, or maybe that was the intention. The movie is spottily brilliant but some of the scenes do tend to drag on, and especially since it is largely just people talking to each other, it can be a bit boring.
At times, the movie is even deliberately opaque, and unless you have read the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Hours by Michael Cunningham (I certainly did not), you might find yourself floundering in its slow, wide wake.
There is a lush array of talent on show in this movie but a lot of dialogue is a bit mediocre, with a few gems thrown in to save you from the banality of it all.
It is indeed a delight to watch this ensemble of actors at the top of their game. I enjoyed Nicole Kidman's performance as the ghoulish and tormented Woolf. A scene when she caresses the dead bird is quite startlingly droll and depressing.
Still, Kidman's character is the soul of the movie but I found her large prosthetic nose to be a serious distraction. It looks like somebody slung two pounds of putty on her face, then crazy-glued it and fashioned it into something that could be mistaken for a nose. In addition, what's with all the touching and tongue-wrestling with her sister? I didn't get it.
Julianne Moore's performance is exquisite as the emotionally distraught suburban housewife, and you can feel her silent horror, tension and contempt for her young son when they interact in the house. You are never quite sure what she is going to do, and the eerie score sets a dark undertone for her scenes with her young son.
Ed Harris delivers a riveting performance as the extremely talkative but brilliant poet dying in a spectacularly defiant fashion of AIDS, and fettered by a love for a woman which he can never consummate.
I believe that Streep was much better in movies like Marvin's Room and the critically acclaimed Kramer vs. Kramer but her acting in this movie is still superb. Through some sort of cinematic osmosis, you feel the wretchedness that dominates her life, and just watch the competing emotions which war on her face in her scenes with the love-of-her-life Richard. It is quite exquisite.
Still, there are many pluses other than the incredible acting: delicate direction, vivid production design, great camerawork (even the sapphic tongue-wrestling is tastefully done) and an eerie-sounding score that heightens the tension in the movie.
Jamaican men might enjoy this movie if only for the fact that as an alternative to straight relationships, it makes lesbianism seem like a colourless, sexless strain that drives women to suicide, or into the arms of other gay men.
Or maybe the real message is that some people, especially AIDS-stricken poets and tortured novelists have to die so that we gain a deeper appreciation for our own pathetic lives.
Whichever message you choose to take away from this movie, one thing is certain, you will certainly enjoy the ensemble cast in The Hours.
