The Hours: A Screenplay

by David Hare

In Richmond, England in 1923, Virginia Woolf is setting out to write the first words of her new book. In Los Angeles in 1951, a housewife, Laura Brown, is contemplating suicide. And in present-day New... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0571214762
• ISBN13: 9780571214761
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Length: 122 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Age Range: 13 to 22 years
• Grade Range: Grade 8 to Postsecondary

Customer Reviews

David Hare Triumphs!

For obvious reasons Hollywood seldom has made real downer movies. This is one of the great downer movies of all time, but it is a literate, adult, thoughtful, and a serious film worthy of our attention. The famous British playwright David Hare, with nine Broadway plays to his credit, wrote the brilliant, innovative screenplay from Michael Cunningham's acclaimed novel. Cinema reaches the viewer's emotions faster and more tellingly and viscerally than the novelist can. There is a complex beginning to the movie with a lot of imaginative cross-cutting. I think the screenplay enhances and surpasses the richness of the novel. The movie tells three parallel, confluent stories with similar incidents about three women. The stories become more charged when they are juxtaposed and crosscut in the film. Two of the women, Virginia Woolf and Laura Brown, are mentally unstable and suicidal. The third, Clarissa, has one of the most stressful days of her life. She is called Mrs. Dalloway by her close friend Richard, a man suffering from the last throes of AIDS. Both Virginia Woolf and Richard hear intrusive, devastating inner voices. Clarissa is an active lesbian, while Virginia and Laura demonstrate lesbian tendencies. Clarissa, like Mrs. Dalloway, is planning a party. Clarissa's is to honor her friend Richard, and both spend their days preparing for the parties. As in "Mrs. Dalloway" the passing of the hours is crucial to the plot. The characters find that "facing the hours" is an enormous challenge. Laura is planning a small birthday party for her husband with her son Richie. Laura, reading "Mrs. Dalloway," in her imagination she sees Virginia drowning. This movie is not about normal people in stressful situations; it is about stress-filled people trying to cope with normal life. The dialogue is crisp with short naturalistic give and take. Virginia Woolf is writing her novel in 1923. She desperately wants to return to the life of London, "the violent jolt of the capital." The cuts back and forth from past to future, from one character's story to the other are fraught with associations and meaning. In the movie Virginia's husband Leonard asks his wife why someone has to die in her novel. She says, "Someone has to die in order that the rest of us should value life more." Who does she decide must die in her novel? "The poet will die. The visionary." Richard is a poet too. These characters are linked in the movie emotionally, psychically, and symbolically, all of it done in triumphant fashion. Clarissa at the end of the movie is at peace, but the movie's coda brings us back to disharmony. The movie began with Virginia in 1941 and jolts us back there before the final credits.