The Hours

I was sick on Friday so while I read a summary of the film later, there's the big gap for me between right when the movie was getting into the action and then the last few minutes of conclusion, and obviously I didn't really enjoy the film as much as I might have. I thought it was interesting that it wasn't just a 1:1 reproduction of the novel but rather messed around with some things. Some of the things I liked most about Mrs. Dalloway weren't in the movie -- for one thing, the most interesting thing for me about Mrs. Dalloway was how Woolf portrayed the characters, and you simply can't do that in a movie. One of the most interesting things about the book for me was the way Woolf both got into people's thoughts but also flitted between people, painting a picture of a crowd. The medium of the movie took that away and while the cinematography was visually appealing, it wasn't as interesting a format.

In the book, I also thought it was interesting how Woolf sort of quartered Septimus's plot, which was much more intense and depressing than the other plots, but let Clarissa feel some of the aftershock of the suicide. I felt that in a way, this made Septimus's suicide more painful. I remember in the book it goes straight from his suicide and the doctor going "oh well" to someone else thinking about something trivial. The suicide popped up once more in the novel, at the end, and I thought Clarissa's thoughts about death were more powerful for being surrounded by her just going about her life, giving parties, etc. The plots in the movie all had suicide, all had people not just not fully happy, which I feel like Clarissa may have been, but very depressed. This is a more focused view on one issue but I feel like it's maybe not as interesting and maybe too much. Overall, I found that while I enjoyed aspects of the movie, it took away some of the things I enjoyed most about Mrs. Dalloway.