So I just finished watching “The Hours” and I understand the main concept of the boy who grows up to become a writer and yada yada, but I get the feeling I’m missing a way bigger picture from this movie! Anyone got any ideas??
That you have to take control of your own life, and be responsible for your own tears, your own happiness, and your own joy. You can’t rely on anybody else, and you can’t supply it to anybody else.
That’s what I got out of it anyway.
I think the movie was about making the right choices for your own life, and not for others. You live for yourself, because no one else knows you better.
Some quotes from the movie:
Richard Brown: I’m not trying to say anything. I think I’m staying alive just to satisfy you.
Laura Brown: What does it mean to regret when you have no choice? It’s what you can bear. And there it is…It was death. I chose life.
Virginia Woolf: If I were thinking clearly, Leonard, I would tell you that I wrestle alone in the dark, in the deep dark, and that only I can know. Only I can understand my condition. You live with the threat, you tell me you live with the threat of my extinction. Leonard, I live with it too.
Upon preview, pretty much what pepperlandgirl said.
Don’t worry, you’re doing better than some people. I swear I overheard a woman saying that she felt most sorry for the little boy of all the characters, because she was sure he was going to have a sad life as an adult. I may be misjudging her remark, but she didn’t seem to realize that the little boy’s “sad life as an adult” was an important part of the film. Maybe she fell asleep before the ending.
Anyway, I think one of the important themes of the movie is depression, both clinical and situational, and the things people do to try and deal with it.
I was looking for more understanding of the story line and characters.
herwono- hmm I did a search and nothing came up for this movie… oops.
I think it’s about how women have had to earn their place in the world. You watch these capable, intelligent, gifted women, and there’s, like, no place for them in a world that offers no outlet for their creative spirit. I think the whole movie comes down to that scene between Julianne Moore and Clare Danes, where you see the one woman who has had to give up on the whole suburban 'Fifties dream to save her life, and the young woman whose life will, instead, be a limitless series of opportunities.
I think the reason this interpretation doesn’t get mentioned all that often is because we’re so far from the intense and world-changing struggles of the Western feminist movement that everyone’s pretty much forgotten we had one. And if I hadn’t seen this same dynamic in the women in generations of my family, I don’t know that I’d have seen it either.
You can trace the parallels by considering this: we lose Virginia Woolf, we almost lose Julianne Moore’s character, but by the time of Meryl Streep’s character’s life, the one in immediate danger is no longer her. And with her daughter, the crippling effect of having your soul slowly strangled by a world that sees you as nothing more than a housekeeper is not going to be a serious threat. I guess another metaphor could be tuberculosis or polio: it used to be a dire threat, but now it’s, you know, a footnote in a history textbook, and hardly anyone believes it could ever have been that bad.
That a gay man wrote this story astounds me: his insight into the changes in the lives of 20th-century women is immense. Then again, who would understand a slow yet inexorable march to freedom and opportunity better than a gay man? I wonder what he’d have done if he’d chosen to write about Black women? Probably something like “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman”, another exceptional book made into a superb movie.