Hours [Paperback]

David Hare (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 20, 2003

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 York, a hostess, Clarissa Vaughan, is planning a party for her friends. In extraordinary and ingenious ways, the film shows how a single day - and the novel Mrs Dalloway - inextricably link the lives of three very different women.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

David Hare is one of Britain's most internationally performed playwrights. Nine of his plays have been presented on Broadway, including Plenty, Skylight, The Blue Room, Amy's View, and Via Dolorosa, in which he also performed. He is currently writing the film of Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, and his new play The Breath of Life, with Maggie Smith and Judi Dench, opens in London in October 2002. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber (January 20, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0571214762
• ISBN-13: 978-0571214761
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #513,875 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars David Hare Triumphs!, July 22, 2008

By 

John F. Rooney - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Hours: A Screenplay (Paperback)

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.