The One Where I Harp on Nicole Kidman's Accent in The Hours---for HOURS

I was around thirteen years old when The Hours came out in theaters. It was conveniently rated PG-13, so there was nothing my mom could say when I begged her to take me to see it. I made a point of reading the book before I saw the movie and The Hours was one of the few films that I didn't have to say was better than the book. I loved them equally. I bought The Hours pretty soon after the DVD was released and when I lost my copy somewhere between Florida and New York, I promptly bought a digital version off of iTunes. The movie provided the background each time I opened Mrs. Dalloway and again when I wrote the paper. I feel like I know The Hours like the back of my hand, but every time I watch it, I notice something different. That doesn't mean that I don't have some major issues with the characters or the actors who played them.

Normally, I think that Nicole Kidman is an excellent actress. She somehow manages to make breathiness into a plausible character trait for every role she plays: Satine in Moulin Rouge--breathy because of consumption; Grace in The Others--breathy because she was dead; Ada in Cold Mountain--breathy because she's...Southern? But this doesn't really work when playing a real person. As a thirteen-year-old, I'm not sure I even knew who Virginia Woolf was and after seeing The Hours, I didn't know much more (She wrote. She killed herself. The end, right?). Once I actually started to study Woolf, however, and began to research her life, I discovered this, the last audio recording of Woolf in existence, on the BBC website. I was a more than a little surprised and disappointed to find that Kidman sounded nothing like Woolf. Sure, every actor doesn't have to sound like the person they're playing and, okay, maybe Kidman didn't have access to this recording (the site was last update in October of 2008), it is all about how believable they are as the character and we can't really use Woolf herself as a measuring-stick for Kidman's portrayal of Woolf and on and on. But this breathiness, that Kidman has brought to every role I've seen her in, distorts our perception of Woolf.

Go on and give that recording a listen. Woolf's voice alone is a pretty striking thing. To me, it sounds almost like every exagerrated, stereotypical impression of British snobbery that I've ever heard. That voice is the way we were encouraged to speak in my high school acting class, when first learning the British dialect. Woolf's voice isn't breathy at all, it's strong and clear and, in not giving the audience that impression, Kidman offers us a very one-sided portrayal of Woolf. By changing her voice, Kidman transforms Woolf from a strong woman (albeit one afflicted by mental illness) to one that is weak and vulnerable, like the dead bird Angelica wants to give a funeral for. For some people, The Hours may be the only glimpse of Woolf they ever get, and Kidman should've made it a good one--not turning Woolf into someone so melancholy and frail that one was almost glad to see her go.

There's also been a discussion about the character of Laura Brown (Julianne Moore). I don't find Laura admirable (like Justine), but I also don't find her irresponsible (like Pat). Or maybe I think that she's both of those things. Honestly, I didn't ever think much at all of Laura Brown until she became the subject of such heated discussion on this blog. I thought she was a little boring, only meant to serve as a somewhat-clever bridge between the writing of Mrs. Dalloway (1923) and the being of Mrs. Dalloway (the present-day, Meryl Streep segments). Upon closer inspection, though, it seems like Laura is a what-might-have-been for the character of Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa "was a Radical" (Woolf, 150) in her youth, reading Shakespeare and Plato and having thoughtful discussions with Sally and Peter "about how they were to reform the world" (Woolf, 33). One gets a sense of who Clarissa might've been had she stuck with Sally or Peter rather than marrying Richard and settling into a life of domesticity, where choosing flowers to a party is more important than reading Shakespeare. Laura is reckless, sure, no good mother would leave two young boys and their father because that was "death"--but she certainly illustrates one of the larger themes of both The Hours and Mrs. Dalloway: how "dangerous" it is "to live even one day" (Woolf, 8). If Laura hadn't experienced the kiss with her neighbor, or left her son to go spend a few hours reading and possibly contemplating suicide, maybe she would've stayed with her family and just maybe, Richard wouldn't have killed himself years later. Similarly, if Virginia Woolf hadn't buried the dead bird, or had been able to have the meal she wanted, or any number of things, perhaps she wouldn't have drowned herself. Who knows? One day can be very, very dangerous and the women in The Hours experience the effects of that danger.

I really wish I had more to say about Meryl Streep in this film but, really, she can do no wrong. I agree with Pat that Clarissa was "the only character...who acts in someone else's interest." Clarissa also seems to be the most well-adjusted. Maybe, though, if The Hours were to have a sequel, she might be experiencing the after-effects of this day and would be a little more selfish because of it.

I think Philip Glass did a great job with the score, the repetitive nature of the music echoed the connectedness of the women's lives. But, listening to Glass's other recordings, I realized that he basically uses the same few notes over and over again...so he loses points for creativity.

Back to Nicole Kidman's voice: perhaps it was the nose.

The Current of Indoctrination

Woolf intends her titular metaphor to have significances as countless as the shifting identities of her characters. We may at first be tempted to translate the symbol by seeing the waves of life's experiences wash away, again and again, the sands of her characters' identities. However, as the novel progresses, Woolf hints that this current is much more malevolent, enveloping, and unnatural than her potentially calming image suggests. Woolf views the waves as an antagonistic force-- as the imposing social obligations that conscript her characters into an existence which, deep within themselves, they regret and even reject.

Woolf expresses this foremost by drowning her prose in compassion and admiration for her characters, though they are flawed and often despise one another. At the beginning of the novel, the young characters distinguish themselves by "speaking" (that is, ruminating) in unique poetic tones. Jinny is "fiery," Rhoda "pale," and most everyone seems to loathe Bernard's intellectual arrogance (21, 16). However, none of the characters can escape the onslaught of the clergy, whom they disbelieve even as children, school, from which they yearn to escape, and urban street mobs, which Louis later pauses to avoid as if they were, perhaps literally, the waves. As he grows older, Bernard laments that the best art is always produced in "solitude" (58). Indeed, he seems nostalgic for the earlier sections of the novel, a time when the characters were freer and more distinguishable. Though the young Rhoda echoes the disenfranchised, contrarian sentiment of A Room of One's Own, and the young Susan pines for unrequited love, all of the characters become in some way disenchanted as they grow older.

Woolf here reveals another application of the metaphor-- the waves draw the countless crystalline grains of sand from the shore, into the sea of conformity. Ironically, Woolf is not echoing the affirming and unifying Hindu image of the soul, in which human drops of water in the sea are in a state of oneness with the universe. Instead, the waves alienate her characters further from the world around them, and from one another. They become, as Bernard describes it, an "encircled population, shuffling past each other in endless competition along the street" (114). Rhoda echoes precisely the metaphor Walter Benjamin applies to the hopeless working class in Paris, "I will fling myself fearlessly into trams" (163). Though the waves may draw the characters together physically over the years, the water soon flings itself upon the shore in a violent splash, alienating them emotionally and spiritually.

[I have chosen to skip ahead to the fourth, "topic of choice" option, as I have not yet had a chance to see one of the films.]

The Hours: Deal With It

When I finally got around to watching Frost/Nixon a few weeks ago, I thought it was a well-paced, suspenseful film with solid performances by Oliver Platt, Sam Rockwell, and (even) Kevin Bacon.  I was, however, constantly distracted by Frank Langella's Nixon impersonation; I didn't see much of a resemblance, and his voice was overdone, with each word spoken from the jowls.  It bothered me the entire movie.  

Last night, I watched Stephen Daldry's film The Hours, and a similar problem arose for me.  Every time Nicole Kidman was on screen as Woolf, I couldn't help but wonder who was in charge of that prosthetic strapped to her nose.  Nearly all the dramatic wind was sucked out of Woolf's sails by that silly makeup job; I couldn't take anything she was saying completely seriously, and it didn't even make her look more like the writer.  That's just one man's opinion though.  She did manage to take home the Oscar for best actress.

The other technical issue I had with the film was the music, particularly during the Laura Brown story line.  I would find myself in a seemingly innocuous moment of a scene, when suddenly my heart would start to race, and I would have no idea why:

  

Laura: I'm going to make a cake.  That's what I'm going to do.  I'm going to make a cake for daddy's birthday. [music: a swelling, swirling crescendo of strings and piano].  

I was on edge the entire time she was on screen.  Now, I know what you're thinking: well, duh. that's the point; it's part of the suspense.  I maintain, however, that there was no suspense at all.  Nothing actually happens with the Laura character, except the metastasizing of her vague, selfish unhappiness.  When I watch a movie or read a piece of fiction, I appreciate actual drama, not melodrama.  In fact, nothing irks me more than melodrama; I find it disingenuous, and it undermines the value of a work for me.

This brings me to my main contention with this film (or perhaps even Michael Cunningham's book, which I have not read).  I disagree entirely with Justine's assessment of Laura.  Justine wrote, "I really admired her acknowledgment of her unhappiness and the urgency of having to do something about it; of having to think of herself before others."  I believe the opposite to be true.  Laura had an obligation to Richard and his sister, from which she fled.  What is this film saying about personal responsibility?  About the abuse of the American dream? -- start over whenever you feel like it?  What about the responsibility to accept the consequences of your choices?  (I never believed, for a moment, that she "had no choice.") 

Claire Danes, despite what many say about her acting abilities, actually plays a pivotal role in this film.  When Laura arrives at Clarissa's apartment in New York, Julia says, "So that's the monster."  Yet after Laura's vague, quasi apology for her disappearance, it is Julia who embraces Laura, as if to accept her apology, as if to reach an understanding of why she needed to escape dreaded unhappiness.  But I remained unconvinced; what on earth does "It was death.  I chose life." mean?  It seems to me that she had a comfortable life in LA to which she chose to be oblivious.  (I was upset that I couldn't stand Julianne Moore's character, when I love that actress.  Maude Lebowski, anyone?) 

I remember something Denis Leary said in one of his stand-up specials several years ago: "Nobody's happy.  Ok? Happiness comes in small doses, folks.  It's a cigarette, or a chocolate chip cookie, or a five-second orgasm. That's it.  Ok?"  Every time I watch a film with the central theme of "well-off person searches for happiness because they don't recognize their fortune at having food, a warm house, and comfort," I get angry and end up ranting like this.  

The saving grace I found in this film was Meryl Streep's Clarissa.  Because she devotes herself to Richard and to throwing his party, she is the only character in the film who acts in someone else's interest.  Though she breaks down for a moment in front of Louis, her reason is plausible; she is witnessing the physical and mental decay of her dear friend.  She is the only character who realizes that showing love for others is the road to any kind of happiness.  Streep saved me from hating this film, with her small glimmer of hope.

 

Today, I scrambled through my folder looking for secondary readings to blog about--but to my dismay, nothing was really sparking any ideas. Eventually, I came across Mr. Cowper's poem "The Castaway," mercilessly shoved in the back of my folder with a dog-eared corner, a crease along the side, and the doodle of a forlorn-looking bunny in the margins.
"This looks promising!" I thought to myself, and then proceeded to read over the poem a few times to help generate some blogging ideas. I remember reading over the poem in class, I remember taking notes about it, and I remember an extensive conversation regarding domesticated rabbit poetry--but I had forgotten how much I love this poem. And finally, I decided that I want to retrace our class discussion about Mr. Ramsay, specifically how Woolf takes Coooper's poem (written well before her time, in 1799) and applies it to Mr. Ramsay's grief about his own life.
While I agree that Mr. Ramsay is a pretty ridiculous character for the most part, I think Woolf's incorporation of Cowper's poem does more than highlight Mr. Ramsay's melodramatic flair for eighteenth century poetry recitations around his beachouse. I think Woolf is also showing how Mr. Ramsay is a "castaway" within his own family.
It's funny to think of Mr. Ramsay marching around on a sunny beach occasionally barking out lines from tragic poems. How can he possibly relate his comfortable, beach-house-owning life to that of the Light Brigade from Tennyson's poem or the castaway from Cowper's? The idea seemed silly then--but now I'm not as sure. In the third section of To The Lighthouse (aptly entitled, "the Lighthouse") Mr. Ramsay is sitting with Cam and James on the boat, feeling like, "...a desolate man, old, bereft..." (169) murmuring the last two lines of Cowper's poem loud enough for his two children to hear:
But I beneath a rougher sea
Was whelmed in deeper gulfs than he
Of course Mr. Ramsay's situation isn't like that of the perilous castaway from Cowper's poem; but, are his feelings all that different than the one's expressed by Cowper? At this point in the novel, Ramsay has lost his wife and he cannot emotionally connect with his children (in fact, his children kind of hate him). Essentially, he is alone on that boat, in the middle of the water, much like a castaway. He isn't under any mortal peril, but another kind of threat is present. There is the threat of him losing a slow battle against his own life; a life of unfulfilled intellectual aspirations, and a life where he is sinking under the waves of emotional incompetence towards his family. I don't think it's all that ridiculous for him to connect with this poem, because while he is a rather self-absorbed man (taking into account only his own grief throughout most of the novel, and demanding sympathy from everyone else), I think his self-woe is what makes him one the most realistic characters in Woolf's novel. Woolf uses Cowper's poem so that Mr. Ramsay has something to hold steadfastly onto; he doesn't have his wife, his children, or the kind of emotional consolation he needs. He has his knowledge, he has eighteenth century poetry, and he has the memorized lines of Cowper to express his innermost grief.

Secondary Reading,The Man Who Saw Himself Drown, Mrs. Dalloway

"The Man Who Saw Himself Drown" by Anita Desai was published in 2000, decades and decades after Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. In the story, a man who is out of in town on business witnesses his own drowning and the ramifications of his death as he walks dazedly through them. The protagonist battles with the consequences of his death, the loss of his wife and children, while also examining what oppurtunities comes with getting a fresh start, ridded of responsibility and identity. As he comes to terms with the realization of his situation, the main character is faced with a choice, "to drown this self that had remained, to drown the double of the self that had already died" (Desai 98) or "to go on with another life, a new life?" (Desai 98)  The story ends with a young boy discovering the body of our narrator, drowned by the timid trickle of a small stream. This story, like Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, uses a character to weigh and explore the meaning of life and death. Similar to the man in Desai's story, Woolf uses Septimus, an emotional ex-soldier struggling with life after battle. Both Desai's character and Woolf's struggle with the challenge of returning to life after it has, essentially, been taken away from them. For Desai, this robbery of life is literal, but Woolf creates a similar dilemma for Septimus and the hollowing out effect that the war has on him, stealing his idealistic youth, his naive mind. Though Desai doesn't refer to Woolf or Septimus in her story, her character's deliberate choice, his thoughtful acceptance of death in order to escape a life he can no longer fully live is reminiscent of Septimus, listening to the futile and imprisoning cures of Dr. Holmes downstairs, before he urgently "flung himself vigorously" (Woolf 164) from the window sill. Both writers use their characters to ask and observe the same question- when life is no longer full, when our grasp of it's beauties and realities, it's quiet pleasantries and joys has been broken, can relief only be found in death?

...even crazy people like to be asked.

I’m sure it was more than the multitude of groans elicited from my father and my grandmother that began my fascination with The Hours from the first time I caught in on television. We tuned in, on shaky ground, right after Virginia kissed Vanessa, and somehow barreled through the movie for a bit, watched something else, and then tuned in just in time to catch Clarissa kissing Sally. No lie. This may seem silly, but this was my first experience with this movie. I had no idea what was really going on, but it was a (relatively) mainstream film and I was caught up in the Philip Glass and the delicious scandalous rush of it all, highlighted by my father and my grandmother’s fierce reactions of disgust and channel-changing. I was hooked and there were so many things I wanted to know. And I couldn’t show it.

This must have been 2005 (and I must have had my license) because the next day, I drove over to FYE and managed to find a used copy of the DVD for six dollars. I watched it that afternoon while dad was at work; no interruptions and no disapproval.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard.

On the contrary, this film was one that threw you into the lives of these three women and the people that mattered to them. It was so delicate and yet so ceaselessly courageous, and I have never identified so much with one film, before or since.

From Laura Brown’s story we have the sense of a woman out of sync with her time and place in more ways than one. I really admired her acknowledgement of her unhappiness and the urgency of having to do something about it; of having to think of herself before others. I love her explanation to Clarissa Vaughn:

It would be wonderful to say you regretted it. It would be easy. But what does it mean? What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It's what you can bear. There it is. No one's going to forgive me. It was death. I chose life.

She teaches Richard that we cannot live for others, try as we may; Richard sees a similar pattern in Clarissa [“Just wait till I die. Then you'll have to think of yourself. How are you going to like that?”].

At the same time, Clarissa expresses emotions that I have certainly felt. [“When I'm with him I feel... Yes, I am living. And when I'm not with him... Yes, everything does seem sort of silly”]. The three impulsive kisses in this film speak to this urgency, this relevancy of the person’s presence in their lives. With Philip Glass’s incredible score to top it off, this movie is intoxicating and inspiring.

Movie Reviews, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf

When I was in sixth grade and my sister was in high school, I happened upon her copy of the Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf screenplay in a family car ride to D.C. While she slept against the window with her headphones blaring, I diligently read the entire screenplay, for lack of anything better to do. When I had finished it, my middle school mind teemed with questions and confusion. Why was everyone so angry? How could all of these characters mistreat each other with such violent, hateful games ? What was the point? And, most importantly, why was that the play's title? Several years, a high school diploma, and a soon to be bachelor's degree later, I have the same questions.

I thought it would be interesting to watch the movie now, with an older and hopefully more mature mindset, to see what my then 11-year old mind was missing. Though I was still confused and tired after watching Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor (who play the main married couple in the movie) tirelessly berate and deride each other, taking with them their youthful and idealistic guests, I was able to pull a little more meaning from the story as well as the characters in it.

The story begins on a university campus, after an apparent party among the university's teaching staff. George and Martha, a middle-aged married couple stumble drunkenly home. Once home, it is clear that their relationship is less than perfect. George is sarcastic and demeaning, while Martha is taunting and vulgar. Neither gives each other a break and therefore, never receives one in return. While they fix themselves yet another drink (a pattern throughout the movie), Martha informs George that the young, new professor in the Math department will be coming by with his equally young wife for a late drink. It is gradually exposed that Martha's father is the president of the university and that George, a once promising history professor, has proved to be an academic and therefore familial failure in both Martha and her father's eyes. The story moves on from here in a haze of cocktails and crude, emotional games between Martha and George. Their repulsion for what the other has become is so tangible, the young professor and his wife are rapidly and unknowingly wrapped up in it. Throughout the movie, we witness the revelation of dark secrets and harsh betrayals, inflicting pain upon themselves and their guests. 

However, the movie ends, surprisingly, quite calmly. The long night is over. The sun begins to rise. The frenzy of the evening cools and, like in the beginning, George and Martha remain, holding each other's hand. 

The movie is both tiring to watch and intriguing. While I found many of the disagreements and behaviors of the characters disturbing, there is a sort of intrigue to the relationships in the movie, and a feeling that you are watching something too personal to see. The movie, as a whole, is not a feel-good flick. It's subject matter is dark and the characters are painful, pitiful creatures who emotionally and physically unravel throughout the film. However, it's unabashed desire to catch and display human beings at their most primal is something I have rarely seen in a movie before. The complexity and depth of human relationships is what this movie relentlessly explores, placing it's characters in abhorrent positions and testing the difference between passionate love and passionate hate. While I still don't know why the movie is called Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" I can surmise that it serves to make a mockery of the people that this particular movie centers around. The title is a song that Martha repeats numerous times in the movie, alluding to a joke at the party the couples had attended earlier that evening. It is here where the mockery may begin. Clearly, this is an intellectual joke, these people are supposedly academics, the movie is literally set on a college campus. However, despite their supposed intellectual facade, they behave like animals, selfishly and recklessly destroying each other with very little sign of remorse. 

Therefore, though I didn't care for the movie much more than I cared for the screenplay after I read it, I can now recognize the boldness of the script as well as the hypocrisy of institutions such as academia, and marriage that is so definitively parodied.