Virginia Woolf has never been quite so mysterious.
At least, not since her death in 1941. But with the advent of Michael Cunningham's ferocious, candid novel "The Hours," and its equally provocative movie version, Woolf has been all the rage again.
In his novel, the Pulitzer-Prize winning Cunningham delves into one of the 20th century's greatest novelists and the mother of the modernists through not only Woolf's story, but also by interweaving a more current theme with two additional characters.
These characters are Clarissa Vaughn, a woman living in New York City in the '90s, and Laura Brown, a housewife in the 1951 post-WWII Los Angeles. Woolf's character is just beginning to write one of her most famous novels, "Mrs. Dalloway," in the 1920s. The novel and movie entwine Woolf's writing the novel, Brown beginning to read the novel and Vaughn being Woolf's heroine, Mrs. Dalloway.
Meryl Streep plays Vaughn, the self-contained, ladylike hostess; Nicole Kidman is a introspective Woolf recovering in the suburbs of London after a nervous breakdown, a neurosis which plagued the writer her entire life; and Julianne Moore is Brown, a woman trapped within the confines of society's dictates at the beginning of what history looks back on as the development of a "modern American family."
Both movie and novel center around suicide and we see Woolf write her suicide note to her husband, Leonard Woolf, then walks to the river, puts a stone in her pocket and drowns herself at the very beginning. The poignancy of that moment takes the audience through the rest of the story with these three overlapping characters.
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Kidman plays Woolf with a tendency to talk to herself and a stilted hesitancy toward anything deemed "normal." Kidman does a very nice job in portraying Woolf's acute genius and need to be in her own space and the audience feels the interruption of the maid when she comes through Woolf's study while writing. Fans of Woolf will recognize this need for her own room through an essay Woolf wrote later, titled "A Room of One's Own."
However, Kidman, either through the translation from book to film or her simply through her own interpretation, takes Woolf's entire character up far too dramatic a notch. Cunningham writes Woolf with a calmness and brevity that ring much truer with her written work than Kidman, who channels the impassioned impetuousness of a child throwing a tantrum -- albeit a prolific tantrum -- in a train terminal. Cunningham's Woolf is much more self-composed, though still at odds with the servants.
Streep also does a lovely job with Vaughn, the '90s Mrs. Dalloway, so utterly engrossed in the act of having a party that she lets the rest of the world slip past her. Her only concern is for her friend, Richard, played by Ed Harris. Richard has AIDS and is slowly wasting away. He also has an intimate tie to the rest of story, but some things people will just need to see the movie or read the book to find out.
Streep also, because of the script changes, has a minor emotional breakdown that is not present in the book. It's a bit irritating that it is she, not the character of Richard's ex-lover Louis Waters, played by Jeff Daniels, starts crying all over the place -- in the novel it's the exact opposite.
That is the heart of the story. It's about these three women coping with what life has given them and sometimes, it's too much to take. Yet the essential thing is that all three women do want to live.
Moore does the best job in portraying this through her character. Brown is stifled by what she thinks she is expected to give her husband and child and it slowly drives her mad. To her, she has the option of killing herself or leaving her husband and son, who is a maddening mama's boy.
These stories all are juxtaposed very well, in both novel and movie, and pose the question of how we all get through the hours and then the hours after that.
Do we live as much as we can despite our limitations or do we take matters into our own hands? We all have that decision to make despite the situation.
Perhaps when Woolf walked into the river with a stone in her pocket she found her own way of truly living, and through her work, one sees how much she truly loved life.
