A note on The Hours,
with a preliminary aside on the art of Robert Altman
COMPARE AND CONTRAST
I have only just seen Stephen Daldry’s film The Hours, three years after its release in the UK, and liked it a lot. What immediately strikes a viewer is the interwoven storyline, the cross-cutting and multiple narrative style. That led me to think about the films of Robert Altman, who has recently died after a long and distinguished career in the cinema. He, too, often employs a technique that favours juxtaposing scenes and situations in order to present a kind of kaleidoscope effect. Indeed, there’s little new here, Akira Kurosawa practised it years ago in his 1950 film Rashomon, not to mention 1940’s Citizen Kane, and there are many examples in literature before that of multi-layered story telling. Also, the disjointed manner of telling a tale, in the so-called stream-of-consciousness genre, comes to mind, particularly favoured by Virgina Woolf. Perhaps this idea influenced Michael Cunningham’s novel and also affected Daldry’s directorial approach. The Hours legitimately has an affinity with Altman’s work but that’s about as far as the connection goes for the film is quite different from anything Altman ever did and is a kind of film quite beyond his vision or ever part of his intention.
For Altman, life can be compared to a bitter joke without rhyme or reason, which could only have been imposed on man by a malicious god with, possibly, a twisted sense of humour. In his best films, like M*A*S*H, he appears to be saying that the most that can be expected of human action is to perform it within a very dark satire that allows only a glimmer of decency to rise above the imbecilities that govern people’s behaviour. Such a stringent view of mankind, mainly taken of his own American citizenry, does indeed lead him to portray life as a mishmash of culture within communities, well demonstrated in Nashville, and probably at its most effective in The Player. His fragmented manner of telling a tale, notably in Short Cuts, for example, where he uses the quite beautiful low-relief engravings of some of Raymond Carver’s short stories, tends to end up as a series of quite unconnected and random happenings and results in his having little to say by the end of his career. In Gosford Park, much over-rated by critics, he takes a rather silly, melodramatic story, in order to portray a display of dud characters that could only exist in the tired mind of a puppet master who has learnt that if he pulls hard enough on the strings something like life appears to energise the creatures at the other end.
INSIDE IVY LEAGUE
There are some critics who will defend Altman, while at the same time recognising, and giving low marks to, the kind of adverse view of his films that I state broadly in the paragraph above. One such critic is Robert T. Self, an English professor, who has written an article for the admirable Senses of Cinema based at the University of Melbourne and which can be found on http://www.sensesofcinema.com. I quote a chunk of Professor Self’s article below as a way of illustrating his view, one I consider to be misguided not only in its assessment of Altman but of what really should grab our attention when we look at and attempt to evaluate films as genuine artistic artefact.
“Classical narrative cinema,” he writes, “assumes the possibility of social discourse and asserts a unified social identity grounded in the secular humanism that optimistically posits ‘man’ as the position of intelligibility, meaningful action, and ethicality. Modernist cinema presupposes on the other hand the world as splintered and centre-less, meaning as imprecise and indeterminate, morality as divisive and illusory. It asserts that the human being is neither an autonomous individual nor a meaningful unity, but a process of divergent and contradictory forces, both internal and external. It suspects the power of communication in the face of human greed, alienation, estrangement, and self-destruction. Rather than encouraging viewer identification with a coherent character psychology, it delineates a variety of contradictory subject positions that critique privileged intelligibility.” Self goes on to speak of Altman’s idiosyncratic, pessimistic, ironic, exuberant and experimental films. He claims they simultaneously define the emergent style of American Art cinema and systematically display a poetic mode of story telling.
OUTSIDE ACADEMIA
It is one thing to support the contentious idea that life consists of a series of largely meaningless random acts, the premise of directors like Altman and “modernist cinema”, and quite another to imply that a coherent art form can be created through mirroring that formlessness. I believe it to be the rôle of the artist to give a discrete shape to a very wide range of impressions and experiences falling within his orbit and thereby to make a meaningful whole, one to be admired, enjoyed and taken in by others. That there are many ways of doing this and that by indirection we often find our way, cannot be denied. The idea, however, that by thrusting confusion into the scene, “a variety of contradictory subject positions”, the artist is not only challenging our “privileged intelligibility” but is also making a new kind of art cinema seems to me not to hold up to the facts. For a start, what does it mean to call Altman’s direction “poetic”? Is it to say little more than he knows quite a lot about film technique? I find too many of his films to be factitious, even tedious, rather than poetic.
If “experimental films” occasionally give us hope in believing that something different, more intelligent, even more “real” than the run of films now emerging from the mainstream industry, that appear to be aimed at an immature audience with a liking for the far-fetched and a cosy “unified social identity”, they do little in the end to reveal the real cultural crisis that confronts nearly all modern societies. To take cinema as a reflection of the mood of the people for whom the films are made is to come to a very gloomy picture of contemporary existence. On the one hand we are subjected to the stereotypical and conventional form of story telling, mostly conveyed through thrillers and far-fetched yarns, with ever increasing doses of superfluous violence, or we have tales of shocking infidelity, disharmony and wretchedness that paint a picture of family and social collapse. There is, I suspect, among the population at large a weakening of what can best be described as a grip on individual reality that extends out not only to other individuals but also encompasses those who have gone before and will come after. I mean, in short, that there are ominous indications that we are losing hope of being attached to a continuous lifeline that transcends finite existence and links us into a sustainable, ongoing history.
Religious bodies offer consolation and promise of the eternal but for the artist, whether believer or not, the proof of the pudding always has to be in the eating, i.e. in the realities of his or her own existence. If we see a film that manages to create imaginatively and intelligently some of the glaringly obvious breakdowns in relationships and within communities and presents us with truths about contemporary life and ourselves that we often conceal and/or ignore, then we should celebrate it. The Hours, I contend, is a work of art, a minor rather than a major one but still quite remarkable given the current state of cinema.
ART MAKING IT REAL
In the linking of three, four actually, central characters in an overlapping time sequence, that both separates and brings them together, and in posing a continuous personal identity crisis of each one, a remarkable narrative form unfolds. The time span extends over seventy odd years but the action is synchronous, giving the impression of having happened within a few short hours, namely in the course of the film itself. One of the characters, the writer Virginia Woolf, lacks any physical contact with the others, who do interrelate at a personal level, but her novel, Mrs Dalloway, informs the living spirit of them all. This spirit engenders and additionally reflects a feeling of desolation, bewilderment and despair in the face of the lives they live. In the case of three of them, Woolf herself (Nicole Kidman), the housewife, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) and her son, Richard, later to become a published poet (Ed Harris), suicide is seen as a solution, two of them succeeding in the act, one not choosing to do so. The fourth protagonist, Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) not only shares her first name with Mrs Dalloway but is also given the full title by Richard. There is a further link in that all four characters show homosexual tendencies, latent in two of them, explicit in the other two, who choose openly gay and lesbian relationships.
The film benefits from many sources, not least the prize-winning book on which the script is based and a first-class job done by David Hare in the screenplay, plus the directorial brilliance of Stephen Daldry. The acting of everyone taking part is just terrific, a whole series of rounded, wonderful performances from the more minor characters to those playing major roles. Everything seems to come together in the film, dialogue, acting, cinematography, Philip Glass’s soundtrack, direction, each aspect contributing towards the unfolding of a tale that has thematic and narrative unity. One small example of how effectively and sparingly the dialogue works is to cite the first words between Virginia and Leonard Woolf. As he greets her descending the stairs, he asks, “How did you sleep?” “Uneventful,” she replies, an oblique reply that tells us so much about her. Then when Clarissa Vaughan tells Richard Brown she is holding a party to celebrate his writing and adds it will be for his friends, he quips “It’ll be a small party, then.” There are some precisely timed silences in between what characters say that speak as tellingly as the spaced-out words. The nuances of facial expression and body language of the actors works so effectively because they are interpreted on the basis of real meaning that informs the whole film.
PAINTERS AT WORK
A number of motifs are slowly planted in the viewer’s mind, like the flowers for celebratory events in each household and in the way these different parties take place and by the breaking of the eggs in preparation of food to be consumed. We know that flowers convey a beauty and delicacy, which qualities are connoted in The Hours primarily by feminine sensibility. We also know that flowers rot all too quickly and may become a symbol of both beauty and death at funerals. In preparing food, the cooks break eggs, which reminds us that you rarely go through life, or make omelettes without a few breakages. Richard, dying from Aids, tells Clarissa, that there will be the hours after the party and the hours after that. He stays alive for her, since “that is what people do, stay alive for each other.” In fact, he reneges on the promise because he has had enough of partying, finding life unbearable, and will endure no more hours. As we accompany Clarissa Vaughan across the icy pavements to the front door of his downtown home, ascend with her up darkly twisted staircases and along slanted corridors to his squalid apartment, we have all the intimations we need of a life askew and out of kilter.
When Richard sits on the window sill just moments before he tumbles down to his death, we hear police and ambulance sirens wailing from the streets below, the sound of traffic deafening, the twenty-first century intruding. Virginia Woolf, living in leafy Richmond in the 1930s, not far from London, cannot bear her surroundings and tries to escape. Confronted on the railway station by Leonard, she tells him, “I am living a life I have no wish to live,” and he agrees to take her to the city, although there is no escape there either. Laura Brown finally says to Clarissa, “What does it mean to regret when you have no choice. My life was death so I left and chose life.” For her, that meant abandoning her family and going to Canada to become a librarian, not a great choice, perhaps. For Virginia Woolf, who, we are informed, has a history of attempted suicide, there remains “the need to look life in the face and then put it away.” She also says the poet, the visionary, has to die in order that new life is sustained. In fact, no such kind of rebirth is ever hinted at in the film, its overwhelming mood elegiac and melancholic.
DIE HARD
It is possible to be deeply moved by The Hours and to lament profoundly the destructive process that assails the lives of all the characters. More importantly even, the film serves up a truth about contemporary existence by showing that where relationships are precariously maintained and where consciousness and self-awareness are finely spun, life might be found to be unsustainable. The idea of death, of people as finite beings, is present throughout, quietly stated but made explicit in the discussion between Virginia and her little niece. While observing a dead thrush, Angelica asks, “What happens when we die?” The aunt says we return to where we came from and the girl responds by saying she can’t remember where she came from and then Virginia admits the same. From this scene, we cut to the forlorn Laura Brown who has rejected suicide as a solution but who remains severely depressed by her unfulfilled marriage and unsatisfactory family life. Her decision is to run away and in crucial respects this is what the other suicides do, only a reluctant Clarissa Vaughan accepting her tried, weary existence and its relationships.
NOT QUITE DEAD
Even though The Hours leads inexorably to the idea that nearly all the main characters find it difficult to sustain an enduring spirit in the face of personal problems I would not say that this produces an insupportable pessimism. Such is the creative act, we are drawn into the dilemmas facing each character, our sympathies deeply engaged. The film is truthful, which means we feel convinced that the protagonists are real and that their experiences are valid ones. Some viewers, and I include myself among them, are confronted with ideas and types of behaviour for which we find little correspondence in our own personal lives and outlooks. In that respect, this film, and any distinctive art for that matter, is asking us to examine what we believe is its function and what we hold it is doing for us. How good an art form is cinema? In my view, any significant artist is creating from the raw materials of personal experience an artefact that is passing out of or coming into existence within the cultural life of society. The more fully alive and more fully extended the consciousness of the artist the greater will be the manner of our involvement, in this instance those of us who watch films. In important respects, The Hours weaves for us an opalescent yet consistent and coherent narrative form, which enhances the lives of the characters involved and which engages the viewer. This happens despite a certain passivity and even negativity present in the tale. There is no sword fight, no discernible enemy, apart from egregious modernity, no driving spirit to scare off the black dog of despair. It’s certainly not Hamlet but it’s not a confusing or confused film either, which I regret to say is not true of many of Altman’s films despite his undoubted major contribution to cinematic history. Above all, for those of us who love cinema, The Hours gives us hope that creative intelligence still exists.
