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FILM | The Hours & The Pianist
Monday, March 03, 2003

Seen at Odeon Covent Garden and Odeon Wardour Street (respectively), February 27th 2003

Last Thursday, Jeremy and I decided to mount a "Let's polish off the Best Picture nominees" double feature, having both already seen Chicago, Gangs Of New York, and The Two Towers (momentary aside: WHY THE FUCK WAS THE TWO TOWERS NOMINATED FOR BEST PICTURE?!? It wasn't as good as the first one, and not just because it was the middle film, either... the script was much, much poorer, for starters).

First up was The Hours, a movie I'd been anticipating seeing for a while -- it just seemed like the kind of gimmicky nonsense I'd fall for. I've read Mrs. Dalloway twice, and am very fond of it, but had never read the actual novel of The Hours, though the film does put across pretty quickly the ways in which the novel plays with Dalloway. Most of the clever little tricks were tolerable, though some were just too much... in particular, the explicit nature of the Ed Harris / Septimus Smith connection. Honestly, it might have worked better if he weren't insane (driven mad by AIDS dementia)... it would have added a different note to (swipe with your cursor to read this, it's a spoiler) his suicide. Although the film's characters are all depressed already, so maybe the question of sanity was needed to keep him apart from the others...

I can only hope the novel is not as clumsy and heavy-handed as David Hare's script for the film was. Good... fucking... GOD. Hare is one of my absolute favorite playwrights (Plenty? Racing Demon? They're great!), but this script was infuriating, bordering on execrable. Every other line of dialogue out of the various characters' mouths was some kind of unbelievable, overdramatic pronouncement of the sort a real, breathing human being would never utter in any situation other than, say, on stage in a bad, bad play, which Hare seemed to think he was writing. I'm overly sensitive to screenwriting, I will say, and I do have very specific ideas of what good dialogue sounds like. But this certainly wasn't it. And Hare also landed squarely on one of my biggest pet-peeves -- over-dramatic usage of a film's title in thematically important dialogue (i.e. "All we have are... THE HOURS"). And he did it twice. TWICE! Some playwrights should be struck regularly, like gongs.

The acting was uniformly excellent, however. Nicole Kidman is every bit as good as you've heard she is; I can't say if she "is" Woolf in a purely accurate sense, but she is entirely compelling. Julianne Moore is actually too far gone in her part for most of the film, but one later scene (I shan't tell you which) does wonders to reclaim her performance -- overall she's better (in essentially the same role) in Far From Heaven but I wasn't too infuriated by the stilted nature of much of her acting. Even the supporting actors are pretty damn good -- Stephen Dillane as Leonard Woolf is especially good, although Jeff Daniels (as an ex-lover of Richard, Ed Harris' dying poet) seemed to be cursed with a "cliched homosexual" on/off switch and the child actor playing Julianne Moore's son is, let's be honest, pretty shitty -- too much scowling and intensity, making him come across almost homicidal in his sensitivity. (Oh, and a brief aside -- I'm officially a member of the John C. Reilly Should Take A Fucking Vacation club. He's a good actor, though this is far and away his least inspired performance of the year... it's just that I'm so fucking sick of seeing his face every time I go to the goddamn movies! Seriously, man! Restrain yourself!) Stephen Daldry does a decent job on the directing end (with the exception of choosing to shoot from a script this ham-fisted), adding just enough visual flair to make things interesting while maintaining a clinical atmosphere that works well with the entirely depressing nature of the material.

Aaaaand speaking of entirely depressing material... after a quick stop at Sainsbury's for lunch (and a giant carton of sub-par gingerbread cookies that I really, really didn't need to buy), we were off to take in Polanski's little hymn to the joys of the Holocaust. I did like the movie, though it's hard to walk out of a Holocaust story pumping your arm enthusiastically and saying "Iiiiii LOVED it!" All Holocaust movies follow essentially the same arc: characters start out living a normal life under the shadow of war; things get progressively worse; the camps fire up; life turns to absolutely unbelievably hellish shit; some vaguely redemptive moment of humanity occurs amongst the wreckage; the war ends and life goes on. This is exactly the arc of The Pianist, although Polanski's main character never even sees the camps (though they do claim his entire family); he spends most of the war in hiding, slowly starving to death in one abandoned flat after another. As you can imagine this does not make for the most action-packed of narratives, though things do step up once he's driven from hiding in the war's final months and forced to scrabble out in the utter wasteland that is Warsaw.

It's not a movie to get excited about, honestly; it's just unobtrusively well-done all around. The script is solid, Polanski's direction is largely graceful (there were, perhaps, a few too many "quirky things happening amidst despair" scenes before the character's lives fall apart completely), and Adrien Brody really is quite good and does deserve his Best Actor nomination if only for the way he manages to deliver a strong performance under utterly crippling physical circumstances -- believe me, it shows that he starved himself for this part. He also adds quite a bit of personality to Szpilman purely through his performance; the script doesn't throw him too many bits to really sink his teeth into as a character but you do get an idea of his demeanor, his sensibility, etc. etc. purely through the way Brody handles him.

(All of this flippant discussion of style does ignore a crucial point, and one of the reasons why movies like this keep getting made, so do forgive me a moment of naivete, as I am a young man -- GOD THE HOLOCAUST WAS FUCKING AWFUL. It really does make one lose faith in humanity's capacity to resist evil to know that something like this happened. Jeremy and I did everything we could to be flippant in the face of it -- as the first cattle train rolled on screen, he offered me a chocolate chip cookie -- but when I ate it I actually felt physically ill. So to comment upon the "Been there, done that" nature of Holocaust filmmaking might be somewhat valid critically, but personally... God fucking damn it was I upset by this film.)

And that was the Parade Of Misery covered. We'd have rented something -- Requiem For A Dream, perhaps? -- to really cap it off, but Jeremy had a paper to write and I had a giant box of gingerbread cookies to dispose of. I've done my best, but the majority of them are still sitting on my dresser at home, their fat little smiling faces (they're the anthropomorphic variety) a grim, ironic testament to a day of intense psychological pain.

What a shitty shitty ending to this post. I love it.

Links:

Rotten Tomatoes: The Hours / The Pianist
A collection of reviews of each film. Rotten Tomatoes, if you don't already know it, is brilliant. Ty Burr's Boston Globe review of The Hours is closest to my own thoughts, though of course I could nit-pick; A.O. Scott's New York Times review of The Pianist is also quite good.
Oscars.com: The Hours / The Pianist
See all the categories each film is nominated in. If you want my opinions and predictions, I say Nicole Kidman both deserves, and is a certainty, for Best Actress; Adapted Screenplay is also likely though The Hours does not deserve it; and it's got a solid shot at Best Picture just because that's how these things work. The Pianist will walk away with nothing. This is not entirely unfair, since Adrien Brody is the most deserving nomination and, in my humble opinion, Nic Cage (who I usually hate, hate, hate) or Jack Nicholson (again?) did even better work.

03.03.2003 | 05:50 PM | TrackBack (0)

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nice remarks on both films. the hours is one of those movies that, if you're not careful, you leave the theater thinking you have to like it; then as you think about it more and more you realize how unenjoyable it really was on most any level. the pianist-- i pretty much felt felt the same way; i actually had a similar reaction of feeling kinda weird about eaiting junk food while watching it... definitely not a movie for sno-caps or buncha-crunch. those boxed candies are too loud for depressing dramas.

Posted by: jeremiah at March 3, 2003 10:01 PM

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I did like the movie, though it's hard to walk out of a Holocaust story pumping your arm enthusiastically and saying "Iiiiii LOVED it!"

Iiiiiiiii LOVE you!

You made me laugh out loud for a good two minutes in the middle of a post about the Holocaust. Congratulations. You win the award for being amazingly funny in the most awkward situation.

Posted by: cat at March 4, 2003 02:53 AM

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Even though The Hours wasn't really a great movie I liked it well enough. I am a sucker for quiet intense movies that try to tell a human story. At least it wasn't a brain dead action "epic" (read Daredevil) with no soul whatsoever. BTW, There was a Mrs. Dalloway movie starring Vanessa Redgrave which came out a few years ago and it was really splendid. Being a Mrs. Dalloway fan you should check it out, if you haven't already.

Posted by: Paul McRae at March 9, 2003 05:28 AM

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chris, you really are a great writer. you should stop doing homework and write full time.

Posted by: jen at March 9, 2003 09:26 PM

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