Why people are afraid of Virginia Woolf

Today is Meryl Streep day in Summer Under the Stars and the day includes a couple of her films that I've wanted to see before. In an odd coincidence, the Streep films on my DVR are not among those on the lineup today. In any case, however, I decided to make today's post be about one of those movies: The Hours.

British writer Virginia Woolf (played here by Nicole Kidman) suffered from depression all her adult life, and she ultimately dealt with it by walking into a river and drowning herself to death in 1941. The movie begins with a dramatization of this, before we switch to the main action. That action is three different stories in three different time periods, all of which are related to Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway (itself turned into a movie a few years before The Hours). The stories are intertwined in the movie in the sense that it's not an anthology movie of discrete stories; instead, the action moves back and forth from one time period to another. I believe the first jump is to the then-present day of 2001, although to make the synopsis a bit easier to follow, I'm going to mention the three time periods and the stories each in its own discrete paragraph, and in chronological order.

Since Nicole Kidman won the Oscar for The Hours, you can expect that Virginia Woolf is rather prominent here. Indeed, Woolf is the subject of the first story, set in 1923 when Woolf was writing Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf was already suffering from her mental illness at the time, and everyone around her knew it, especially her husband Leonard, who moved her from London to one of the Home Counties so she could live somewhere less stressful, and he could start a publishing business out of the house to be closer to Virginia. Virginia's sister Vanessa (Miranda Richardson) pays a visit from together with her three children, and this is enough to bring up another of Virigina's depressive episodes, as she'd like to live in London again.

The second story is set in 1951, in one of those new developments in Los Angeles that sprung up after World War II. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is a housewife with young son Richard, and a second child on the way, married to Dan (no connection to the crappy writer). Dan had served in World War II and one of the things that sustained him was the hope that he could return home to a happy and quiet domestic life. He thinks he has that in his marriage to Laura, but deep down inside she's unhappy, and reading Mrs. Dalloway as a form of escapism. Meanwhile, her next door neighbor Kitty (Toni Colette) has to go to hospital for a uterine biopsy that may explain the reason why she's been unable to get pregnant. It's all enough to drive Laura to have thoughts of suicide, just like Virginia Woolf did.

Finally, in 2001, Clarissa (also the first name of Mrs. Dalloway in the Woolf novel) is a successful New York editor with a complicated personal life. She's living in a lesbian relationship with Sally (Allison Janney) and has an adult daughter Julia (Claire Danes). But, much earlier in life, she had an affair with Richard (Ed Harris), a gay poet who now has AIDS-induced mental issues. He lives in a crappy apartment converted from some sort of industrial building, where he spent 10 years writing a novel about all his friends, including his gay ex, Louis (Jeff Daniels). Richard is about to receive a prestigious award for his poetry, and Clarissa is throwing a party for him where he's expected to attend. He doesn't care for the award, however, figuring they're giving it to him now since he's probably dying.

The three stories are a bit complicated since the action keeps moving back and forth. I think the stories are also not always helped by the writing, especially the 1950s portion which seems like the stereotypical "gee, aren't the suburbs so stifling" message that gave me big problems with a movie like No Down Payment. The Hours, instead, is a movie for the acting. Pretty much all of the performances are excellent, Kidman picked up the Oscar, although any of the three female leads would have been worthy of a nomination. The male supporting roles are also well-portrayed, and even the child actor playing Laura's son in the 1950s timeline is quite good, with no cloying overacting.

It's a shame TCM couldn't be showing The Hours today, but then again, Meryl Streep has so many excellent movies to her name that a lot of them have to be excluded in just a 24-hour period.

The Purple Rose of Cairo

I notice that the Woody Allen movie The Purple Rose of Cairo is going to be on TCM tomorrow afternoon at 2:15 PM. So this morning was the perfect time to sit down to watch it again and do a blog post here.

Mia Farrow plays Cecilia, a struggling waitress in New Jersey in 1935 who lives with her husband Monk (recently deceased Danny Aiello), an unemployed factory worker (remember, this being 1935, there's a depression on). It's not much of a life, so to deal with the humdrum existence, Cecilia likes to go to the local movie theater for some escapism, seeing a movie called The Purple Rose of Cairo multiple times.

She's about to start seeing the movie more, because she finds that Monk is cheating on her while a dispute with her boss at the diner gets her fired. So after leaving Monk she decides to spend all day at the theater watching this formulaic movie. The plot of the movie-within-a-movie, such as it is, has some socialites going on a trip to North Africa where they meet adventurer Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels) and bring him back to New York.

If the movie-within-a-movie is less than exciting for those of us who have watched a ton of 1930s movies, imagine how it must have been for the actors who had to do take after take. So one day, while Cecilia is watching the movie for the umpteenth time in a row, something strange happens. Tom Baxter decides he's tired of this lame story, and decides to step off the screen, having seen the way Cecilia eyes the dashing young adventurer! The two then run out a side door of the theater.

Now, this doesn't seem to be a fantasy or dream sequence, because odd things start happening at the theater. The other characters in the movie-within-a-movie start complaining about the absence of Baxter, and start showing up as though they're actors on the set back in Hollywood, between takes. And other patrons in the movie theater start complaining about what they're seeing, since they paid to see an actual movie after all.

News of this all hits Hollywood, where Gil Shepherd (Jeff Daniels again), the actor who plays Tom Baxter, is horrified because of this and what his character's refusal to keep doing the story will mean for his career. So Gil heads off to New Jersey to try to find Tom, meeting Cecilia along the way since she's more or less protecting Tom. As for Tom, he begins to have problems since he's still not a real person despite having stepped off the screen....

It's an interesting premise, and one that's handled pretty well by Allen and the actors. Daniels, with the double role, has the most to do here and shows again that he's actually a capable actor. Farrow is good as well, although I find it difficult to think or her apart from the personal problems in her relationship with Woody Allen. Watch for Van Johnson in a small role as one of the characters in the movie-within-a-movie; I also could have sworn one of the complaining patrons looked and sounded a bit like Broderick Crawford, although IMDb and Wikipedia say no. I think fans of 1930s movies will really enjoy Allen's homage to the genre here.

The Purple Rose of Cairo seems to be out of print on DVD, although you can watch it at Amazon streaming if you can do the streaming thing.