4/1/09

The Hours

After posting about The Reader, I thought I would delve further into the oeuvre of Stephen Daldry, a neglected great director who was responsible for the 2002 masterpiece, The Hours.

Dan shares his feelings about this film in his review on Cinemension: “This tale of three women easily trumps any of Woody Allen’s films that centre on women characters, such as Interiors or Hannah and Her Sisters. Meryl Streep is supernal as Clarissa, and the score by Phillip Glass is sublime. As an auteur, Daldry reaches the heights scraped by precursors such as Fassbinder, or that enfant terrible, Jean Cocteau; one might describe them as protoceratops to Daldry’s triceratops.”

He adds, “As a poet, I must also say that the scenes with Richard in NYC are personally resonant, both in how they capture the emotional truth of being a poet in an uncaring world & how they show Manhattan lofts to be the centre of artistic life, much as they were during my own youth.”

On her blog, Jessica remarked, “It’s well known that I admire artists with problems. Richard Yates was a big old drunk, Rilke had bad breath, and Sylvia…well, we all know what happened to her. So I enjoy The Hours because it depicts Virginia Woolf, who was swimming in problems…until she drowned herself, of course. She had to deal with some really difficult kitchen staff, there was all that stress of running her own press…and then of course, that schnozz of hers was just endless. In addition Woolf’s nose, I am an admirer of her prose, particularly To The Lighthouse, because of her incandescent sentences and her characters that represent the truth about women. Just thinking of this great novel, I can practically taste the boeuf en daube!”

She also remarks, “I love the scene in this film where Meryl Street breaks down wearing her dishwashing gloves; I often like to stand by my own sink and pretend to be a domestic wreck just like her character, Clarissa. When I’m not doing that, I like to lie on my bed and imagine the room filling with water, as I feel such is a powerful image that rings with truth about the female condition. With prosthetic noses, suicide, Claire Danes, AIDS and lesbianism, this film truly has it all.”

With endorsements such as these, how can you resist this film?