The Hours, a Chronologically disjointed story

 Personally, I was very confused after watching The Hours for myself.  This confusion can probably be attributed to the chronological distortion of different stories merging together.  In a sense, from the first story, starring Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, I can witness a deeper background to Mrs. Dalloway and how it relates to Woolf's personality and characteristics.  The idea of suicide is abundant throughout the movie, yet in the end Woolf is the only one to actually submit to this idea.  

I think there can be some connections made between the 3 different women, but I also feel it is wrong to say that they are essentially personality clones of each other in different time frames.  Woolf in a way feels a lot more like Septimus in this sense, while the others who reflected and chose lightly felt a lot closer to the character of Mrs. Dalloway.  (In this case, Clarissa Vaughan who is played by Meryl Streep is actually called "Mrs. Dalloway" by Richard her former lover?)  Laura Brown who is played by Julian Moore reminded me of Mrs. Dalloway's last moment in her story, contemplating suicide in the end.

The chronological distortion of this story is almost reminiscent of that in Godfather Part 2, where the story shifts from a young Vito Corleone to a present-day crime boss Michael Corleone constantly.  The stories don't have direct effects on each other,  yet they are spiritually connected by one unifying theme.


Comments

  1. BiancaOctober 17, 2020 at 8:43 AM

    I agree that the timeline was very confusing to follow. Each woman was dissatisfied with her life, but it was hard to unravel the connections between each storyline and keep track of three separate plots. There were also some historical inconsistencies in the Virginia Woolf plot, which threw everything else off. I think anyone who hadn't read the book would get the wrong idea of what it was about if they saw this film.

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