Gloria Steinem doesn't get "The Hours." Neither do her critics.
The Oscar-contender, based on the prize-winning novel by Michael
Cunningham, is a meditation on Virginia Woolf's novel "Mrs.
Dalloway" and, for most folks, a thought-provoking two hours of
cinema -- unless you happen to be an ideologue of left or right.
Writing in the Los Angeles Times on Jan. 12 (not available without
a fee), all Steinem sees is feminist propaganda, which makes her
glad. She's especially fond of the storyline set in the 1950s about
a suicidal housewife trapped in suburbia with spouse and child (and
another one on the way) -- prime Steinem territory. She
writes:
"Some male moviegoers emerged bewildered about why Laura wasn't happy with just her nice house, nice marriage, and nice son -- as if they would have been."
This provoked conservative columnist Rod Dreher, writing in
National
Review Online to comment:
"Well, call me a caveman, but yes, I did wonder why Laura (Julianne Moore)"with a loving husband and a small boy who adores her, was made so miserable by her existence.... It's telling that Steinem"assumes that all women naturally understand Laura's decision (guess what, they don"t)."
I"m not going to give away Laura's "decision," put you get the point. Dreher, who labels the film an "apologia for evil," buys Steinem's interpretation and rejects both the film and Steinem.
But neither grasps the movie I saw. Consider the two other storylines in the film. In the earliest, Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) has been free to rebel against Victorian repression with her Bloomsbury Set colleagues and a husband who is willing to sacrifice his own career to support her life of artistic self-expression. She's miserable and suicidal. In the present-day story, Clarissa (Meryl Streep) is a lesbian mother (via a sperm donor) with a loving partner (Allison Janney) and a rewarding career as a Manhattan literary editor who throws parties for the avant garde. She's miserable and suicidal.
If Laura is depressed because 1950s conformism clashes with her, as they say, lesbian tendencies, Clarissa is unhappy because, as it turns out, the true love of her life was a poet, Richard (Ed Harris), who after one blissful summer left her for a man. In sum, the film, like "Mrs. Dalloway," is a reflection on why people can't be happy, always pining for what they don't have or think they"ve lost. Ultimately, Clarissa in the movie, as with her namesake in Woolf's novel, finds that it's the small, fleeting happinesses of life that are to be treasured.
But if Gloria Steinem wants to see a feminist anthem, and if Rod
Dreher wants to condemn it as such, then I hope they enjoy
themselves. But they've missed out on a truly interesting
film.
--Stephen H. Miller
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