Review – The Hours

Three interwoven stories, only one of which was worth a darn. Nicole Kidman actually does a solid job as Virginia Woolf. The plot’s a standard story about a brilliant woman suffocated by her well-meaning but ignorant husband, but it’s touching stuff. Odd, then, that the other two present such awkward treatments of women that they effectively undo the work carefully woven by the Woolf strand. The 1950’s plot dwells on a woman who appears to be emotionally scarring her young son thanks to her suicidal neurosis, and the contemporary plot brings that scarring to fruition when the boy-now-grown-to-a-man, driven by AIDS and ennui, decides to kill himself in front of his own personal Mrs. Dalloway. The final product (again with the exception of the Woolf plot) reeks of gay-man-who-thinks-he-understands-women, an NPR-ish no-really-I-care-about-your-feelings charade that isn’t ultimately any more sensitive to its female characters than the average episode of “The Man Show.” Mildly amusing