Hours

Read Hours Storyline:

The Hours is both an homage to Virginia Woolf and very much its
own creature. Even as Michael Cunningham brings his literary idol back
to life, he intertwines her story with those of two more contemporary
women. One gray suburban London morning in 1923, Woolf awakens from a
dream that will soon lead to Mrs. Dalloway.
In the present, on a beautiful June day in Greenwich Village,
52-year-old Clarissa Vaughan is planning a party for her oldest love, a
poet dying of AIDS. And in Los Angeles in 1949, Laura Brown, pregnant
and unsettled, does her best to prepare for her husband's birthday, but
can't seem to stop reading Woolf. These women's lives are linked both
by the 1925 novel and by the few precious moments of possibility each
keeps returning to. Clarissa is to eventually realize:
There's just this for consolation: an hour here or there when our lives
seem, against all odds and expectations, to burst open and give us
everything we've ever imagined.... Still, we cherish the city, the
morning; we hope, more than anything, for more. As
Cunningham moves between the three women, his transitions are seamless.
One early chapter ends with Woolf picking up her pen and composing her
first sentence, "Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."
The next begins with Laura rejoicing over that line and the fictional
universe she is about to enter. Clarissa's day, on the other hand, is a
mirror of Mrs. Dalloway's--with, however, an appropriate degree of
modern beveling as Cunningham updates and elaborates his source of
inspiration. Clarissa knows that her desire to give her friend the
perfect party may seem trivial to many. Yet it seems better to her than
shutting down in the face of disaster and despair. Like its literary
inspiration, The Hours is a hymn to consciousness and the
beauties and losses it perceives. It is also a reminder that, as
Cunningham again and again makes us realize, art belongs to far more
than just "the world of objects."