Chapter ten: The Hours

In the 1920's, Virginia Woolf wrote a book called Mrs. Dalloway. The book is about an upper-class woman, Clarissa Vaughn, is going out to buy flowers for a party she is hosting this evening. Along the way, she encounters three of her former suitors all in the span of a single day. This leaves Clarissa having fantasies of her past romances and exploring what the underlying message of life is. I myself have not read the book, but at least that's what I gather from it.

Woolf wrote the novel in order to bring attention to less commonly talked about emotions like love and depression. At the time of her writing, Virginia was also battling some of her own mental health issues. Her husband was cautious over her, and so maybe the book was a way to sort for her to paint what she wanted in her life; a coping mechanism against all her own difficulties more or less. Virginia is the first woman whose story we see in the movie. The opening scene is in 1941 as she is drowning herself, but her story rewinds from that point in time, and we see her life unfold.

My favorite scene in the movie is one with her in it. She has walked to the bus station to leave town and return to London, when her husband finds her sitting on a bench. "It is time to go back to London." She says."This is not you speaking Virginia. This is an aspect of your illness...It is what you hear...If you were thinking clearly, you would remember that we brought you to Richmond to give you peace."

She has had enough and tells him,

"It is my voice. It's mine and mine alone. It is mine! I'm dying in this town! If I were thinking clearly, if I were thinking clearly, Leonard, I would tell you that I wrestle alone, in the dark, in the deep dark, and that only I can know, only I can understand my own condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too. This is my right. It is the right of every human being. I choose not the suffocating anesthetic of the suburbs, but the violent jolt of the capital, that is my choice.The meanest patient, even the very lowest is aloud some say in the matter of her own prescription. Thereby she defines her humanity. I wish, for your sake Leonard, I could be happy in this quietness, but if it is a choice between Richmond and death, I choose death."

He answers, "Very well, London then. We'll go back to London. This scene is so powerful in my opinion. I think it just shows her perspective that she wasn't mentally insane, she just thought differently than her husband.

Next, is the story of a pregnant woman in 1951, named Laura Brown. She is in the process of reading Virginia Woolf's book, and I interrupted her side of the plot as the book giving her the wrong ideas. She's unhappy with where she is and she's looking for a way out of her marriage and her family. I think she reads something about Clarissa's lively, young, wishful spirit and it gives her the idea to walk out on her family.

When her husband leaves for work, she bakes him a birthday cake with their toddler son, Richie. Afterwards, she takes pills out from the medicine cabinet and drives Richie to the nanny's. Then, she takes herself to a hotel room. I think you can put two and two together and figure out what she's about to do. However, she doesn't go through with it. She comes back and instead, she waits until her second child is born. Then, she leaves her family and doesn't come back. This is not shown in the movie.

We are then Introduced to Clarissa Vaughn in 2001. If you notice, her name is the same as the Clarissa Vaughn from Virginia Woolf's book. She even lives a modernized version of the life of the character. Today, she's planning a party to honor her friend Richard and the award that has been given to his book. Clarissa is on her way to the flower shop to bring a bouquet to Richard. He has AIDS, and so Clarissa is his caretaker. They two and a romantic fling, before they both turned separate ways. On the morning of his party, he is rather pessimistic because he wonders the purpose of his life. Richard asks her, "Would you be upset if I died?" "What do you mean? What- what are you trying to say?" She asks. "I mean, I think I'm only staying alive to satisfy you." She responds,

"Well, that is what people do. People, they- they stay alive for each other."

That afternoon, Clarissa returns to the dingy apartment to prepare Richard for the party. Only, he has taken a redline with a Xanax and is spun out of control. Clarissa does her best to console him by saying,

"You do still have good days left, you know that."

But her efforts are futile, because all Richard can think about is how beautiful Clarissa is, and how much his illness is controlling his life, and how even if he goes to the party, there will still be hours after the party that he has to face. He also has the notion that his apartment is in need of light. So, he rips off the curtains, opens the main window and sits on the sill. Before he falls he says to Clarissa calmly,

"I love you, Mrs. Dalloway."

There is no party that night. Instead, Clarissa finds Richard's phone book and calls his mother; Richard's mother is Laura Brown. This is how all three stories connect to one another. When Clarissa asks Laura about Richard's childhood, she explains with tears in her eyes why she left and what she did, ending the conversation by saying this speaking of her family,

"...it was death. I chose life."

As the movie comes to a close and the single day ends, Virginia is writing her suicide note addressed to her husband. In it, she writes,

"...Leonard, always the years between us. Always the years. Always the love. Always the hours."

I think this movie is highly underrated. It's an emotionally heavy, riveting film that could make you uncomfortable with its deep subject matter, however it is a genuinely good piece of cinema about the twenty-four hours that three women live and all that can occur during that time. It really brings to light all that can happen in a day depending on how you spend it, as well as all of the emotions that the human brain can experience in just one day. One day is all it takes. It's all about how you spend the hours and make them yours. Julianne Moore played Laura Brown, Nicole Kidman played Virginia Woolf and won a Golden Globe for the role, and Meryl played the busybody Clarissa Vaughn.

As always, thank you for the entertainment, Meryl.