Thursday, March 27, 2003

The Hours

Who's seen The Hours?

I saw it last night, and have been thinking about it all day.
I think I was very impressed.

Was annoyed by the make-up on Nicole Kidman and Ed Harris (and his cliched role).
Also a bit annoyed by the Philip Glass music (every time it comes on the soundtrack you just know that some famous actress is about to start getting emotional again).

But I liked all the actors ('specially Julianne Moore - and the kid who plays her kid with the big sad eyes).
And I hadn't realised that it was all going to be so much about the characters being lesbians and what satisfaction they could get from their lives.
The writer obviously read Mrs Dalloway and saw it's central character (a woman with a perfectly nice life who feels that it could have been something more if she had not married her husband but gone along with another fella) as being Virginia Woolf's way of writing about herself - married to a man but wondering how much better it would have been to go with the woman she wanted instead.

I'm not sure if Viriginia would approve of herself being psycho-analysed in an american movie this way?

____________
matt
Sydney 2003

---Who's seen The Hours?

Not me. But I have read a good deal of Virginia Woolf, so I felt compelled to say something.

---The writer obviously read Mrs Dalloway and saw its central character (a woman with a perfectly nice life who feels that it could have been something more if she had not married her husband but gone along with another fella) as being Virginia Woolf's way of writing about herself... I'm not sure if Viriginia would approve of herself being psycho-analysed in an american movie this way?

As I've said, I've neither read nor seen The Hours so I don't know what I'm talking about. It's cool, though, how different my impression of reading Virginia Woolf's stuff was. I always had it not that the characters would rather be with someone else, but that they would rather be ultimately with nobody at all. I don't mean that they all wanted to become hermits, but all of her characters--to me, anyway--really prized their internal lives, and saw some of the relationships they had as hampering their ability to grow personally. Now I'm making Virginia Woolf sound like a self-help book, which makes me ill, but I do think that her characters treasured their isolation somewhat. Woolf's nonfiction, I think, makes the point even more clearly: the title isn't "A Room of Her Own," it's "A Room of One's Own." The singularity--and the androgyny--in the pronoun is totally intentional.

But given how much she seemed to treasure her privacy, I think Woolf would be insulted at anyone insinuating anything about her, whether they were Americans or not. And I agree with her: I'm a member of that old-fashioned camp who thinks that fiction is fiction, and it's unfair to assume anything about the author by what they write. I also understand, though, that that's not how lots of folks seem to read fiction anymore. Jesus, I sound like an old man.

Brian