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The Hours – Kidman 0 – prosthetic nose 1 – the nose has it

Streep Moore Kidman - the 3 coldest actresses in movies

The Hours – Stephen Daldry

Oh Ms Kael, where are you when we need you most? The Hours is the kind of meretricious, overblown, overacted, worthy movie for which Pauline Kael kept her sharpest wit and keenest barbs. And just the kind of art-on-its-sleeve literary pretentiousness members of the Academy love to reward with golden baldies.

The best first: the editing is excellent; three time-shifted stories subtly and seamlessly woven together drawing us in to three separate but emotionally inter-related stories. And each story is potentially absorbing, moving and the stuff of everyday but very real human tragedy. But the beautiful film this might have been is blown out of the water by grandiose ‘look-at-me’ acting; unremittingly tedious, theatrically conceived direction; and the most intrusive musical score since Rachmaninov was scandalously misused to drench Trevor and Celia’s less than brief encounter in melancholic romanticism.

I’m not sure David Hare’s self-consciously literary script is in fact playable, with its ‘aren’t-I-clever’ put-down lines like “San Francisco is the kind of city you’re told to like” signalling instantly the script’s English intellectual provenance. And I defy anyone to keep their shoulders still in response to Kidman’s Virginia Woolf declaiming “If I have to choose between Richmond and death, I’ll choose death”. At least American movie-goers will have the advantage of finding this exchange totally incomprehensible. We English have to take the bathos full on the chin.

The deepest mystery is how Director Daldry can have taken such an embarrassment of genuine, cinematic acting talent riches and turned every single performance into such incredible, overblown mummery. Alison Janney, best known for her work in TV, especially The West Wing, is the only credible performance in the whole movie and she has very little to do. How could actors of such talent and experience as Streep, Moore and Harris have allowed such OTT performances to escape onto film? Stephen Dillane as Leonard Woolf also does his best but the shallow intensity of Kidman’s Virginia gives him nothing to work with. Instead of a devoted husband struggling to preserve the sanity of a wilful, talented, depressive wife he sounds like an irritable housemaster scolding a wayward 6th former for smoking behind the bike sheds.These actors aren’t going for gold statuettes for movie art; more like gold medals in the emoting Olympics. Daldry’s theatrical background is perhaps to blame for the performances and his lack of filmaking experience comes through in vapid camera work where every close-up outstays its welcome long after we’ve lost interest in what we are supposedly in close to see.

It would be unkind to dwell too much on the performances in detail: all the players have in the past, and will again, do work of real quality. I’ll confess to a Kidman blind spot – except for Moulin Rouge. But if this flat, mannered, myopic performance does indeed get the best actress award, then I sincerely hope the clip shown on Oscar night is the bit where she strews a dead sparrow with roses and lies her head down beside it. I swear to God the expired bird has more life in its supposedly dead eyes than we see in Kidman’s throughout the whole movie. Not since Elizabeth Taylor delivered a whole monologue with an eponymous and palpably stuffed sandpiper plonked in the middle of her hair, has there been a more risible scene. Meryl Streep returns to her angsty, over-wrought worst of yesteryear. And how oh how, did Mr Daldry manage to bleed Julianne Moore of any personality or animation before dressing her as a Mrs Doubtfire look-a-like in the best-written and potentially most moving part of the film? Even Streep in this scene stops for once doing too much ‘acting’ to rescue a scrap of credibility – though too late.

The tone of the whole movie is like a book where every word is in bold, italicised and underlined three times. Just in case we hadn’t caught all the signalled, wrung-out emotion of every scene the endlessly intrusive musical score surges in and out like a flooding tide to drown us in transparently manipulated emotional response. This inescapable, naggingly distracting score that keeps washing over us is enough to have us longing to nick Virginia’s stones for our own pockets to put us out of our misery and drown out its excesses.

(February 2003)

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