My
favorite season of the year is early Spring. I
love the music of the songbirds and the rich,
earthy aroma of manure . . . Wait a sec! It's
not Spring yet, it's still Winter! That sound
I hear isn't the music of songbirds, it's the
shrill trill of chickenhawks chirping for oil!
And that rich, earthy aroma isn't the smell of
manure; it's the odor of this year's Academy Award
nominees!
As usual, the big parade
is led by trombones -- pictures that lack style
and substance but make up for it with an overblown,
blaring proclamation of their own importance.
Based on a book by a man (Michael Cunningham),
scripted by a man (David Hare), and directed by
a man (Stephen Daldry), THE HOURS purports to
give us a deep and profoundly insightful look
into the heart and soul of a great woman writer
(Virginia Woolf) and several of her weepy, emotionally
disturbed spiritual descendants, but what we actually
get is a paper bag full of hot air, a movie that
is contrived, pretentious, artsy-fartsy, heavy-handed,
humorless, relentlessly self-congratulatory, and
totally out of touch with the real world.
Meryl Streep strives
mightily to make her stilted lines sound halfway
natural, but the other members of the cast are
as phony as the screenplay itself. Nicole Kidman
plays Woolf with a single facial expression that
never changes -- a look of irritated distress
normally associated with people who are suffering
from constipation. The scene in which she overcomes
writer's block to create the first sentence of
Mrs. Dalloway is hilarious, or rather, it would
be hilarious if the viewer weren't already stupefied
by the movie's oppressively dreary tone. Julianne
Moore, playing a housewife named Laura Brown who
is suicidal for no apparent reason other than
that she happens to be reading Mrs. Dalloway,
also goes through the whole flick with a single
expression of distress, though in her case it's
not so much irritated distress as dreamy distress.
As bad as these two are, they can't hold a candle
to Ed Harris, whose depiction of a prize-winning
novelist dying of AIDS may well be the most overwrought,
melodramatic, hyper-histrionic performance in
the history of cinema. I breathed a sigh of relief
when he finally threw himself out a window.
Critics have been commenting
on the prosthetic special effects, so I suppose
I should too. Nicole Kidman's enlarged schnozzle
is more believable than any other aspect of her
portrayal of Woolf, and frankly, I think it makes
her more interesting and therefore more attractive
than she is with her real nose. But Julianne Moore's
wrinkle-job is a disaster. Instead of aging her
fifty years (the intended effect), it makes her
look as though she's still as young as ever but
afflicted with some ghastly skin disease.
Finally, Phillip Glass
deserves special mention for having created the
cheesiest and most emotionally manipulative background
music ever heard in a film not directed by Steven
Spielberg.
VANCE’S
FIVE BEST FILMS OF 2002
By now, many
of you may be thinking, "All right, Aandahl,
you sarcastic jerk, if you're so clever and witty
and perceptive, what films would you nominate
for best picture of the year? Go ahead, you smart-ass
creep -- stick your neck out and see how you like
it when those of us who adored THE HOURS and can't
stand your nasty little wisecracks get a chance
to laugh at you." Very well then. The critic's
work is a thankless task, and he who ridicules
must expect to be ridiculed in turn, but I'm not
afraid to commit myself. Among the movies I saw
during 2002, the five I liked best, listed in
alphabetical order, were THE
GLEANERS AND I, PERSONAL VELOCITY, THE
PIANO TEACHER (not to be confused with THE
PIANIST), TALK TO HER, WHAT
TIME IS IT THERE? I've lost my appetite for
the slick, glossy, formulaic films that Hollywood
churns out, so it's no accident that four of my
nominees are foreign, and the one that's American
(PERSONAL VELOCITY) is a low-budget indie. My
winner, you ask? THE
GLEANERS AND I, hands down.
 
The Hours
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