Great blogging minds think alike: coincidentally, Matt and I rented and watched The Hours DVD on the same night that Calamity Jane did. I didn't get a chance to see the extras featurette that got CJ's dander up--the one that fixates on VW's dark and troubled psyche--but interestingly I came to much the same conclusions watching the film itself. Nicole Kidman's performance is strong, but whose Virginia Woolf does she give us? Her own? Michael Cunningham's? Stephen Daldry's? I don't know if Kidman's brooding, restless, withdrawn, and self-absorbed Virginia Woolf originates with herself, the novelist, or the director, but I do know this: she doesn't originate with Quentin Bell, whose VW is by turns bawdy, petty, effervescent, generous, despondent, mischevious, snobbish, and always, always brilliant. Quentin Bell is Virginia Woolf's nephew and biographer. The biography is superb--for me a touchstone, something I return to again and again. While Bell doesn't skirt Woolf's mental illness and the depths of her depression, that side of her is never allowed to dominate the portrayal as a whole, as it does in The Hours. The Hours gives us a monochromatic picture of a personality; Quentin Bell gives us the halftones.
The other disappointment was the language. Virginia Woolf always had words--beautiful, witty, effortless words--at the ready. But that dexterity isn't captured in the film. Kidman has one poetic line about the anaesthesia of the suburbs and the jolt of the city, but the rest is colorless.
The real surprise was Stephen Dillane's performance (not sure if I got the name just right), who plays Leonard Woolf. Extraordinary. The scene where he capitulates to Virginia's desire to return to London, against all his better instincts, is incredibly moving. But then I've always been partial to Leonard, the unsung hero of Bloomsbury. As Bell writes in Bloomsbury Recalled, the "great task of his life . . . was to keep Virginia alive and sane."
Posted by karik at July 3, 2003 1:19 PM | TrackBackThat captures it perfectly, Kari. By contrast, the New York Times, in the person of reviewer Stehpen Holden, was more easily impressed:
"In ''The Hours'' Nicole Kidman tunnels like a ferret into the soul of a woman besieged by excruciating bouts of mental illness. As you watch her wrestle with the demon of depression, it is as if its torment has never been shown on the screen before. Directing her desperate, furious stare into the void, her eyes not really focusing, Ms. Kidman, in a performance of astounding bravery, evokes the savage inner war waged by a brilliant mind against a system of faulty wiring that transmits a searing, crazy static into her brain."
I mean . . . is it me, or is that a little over the top?