THE HOURS….I just got back from seeing The Hours. I really only went to see it because I wanted to see all the Best Picture nominees before the Academy Awards ceremony, so I wasn’t expecting much. Somehow a review of melancholic women of the 20th century didn’t seem all that appealing.
But I was wrong: it’s a terrific movie. Granted, if you just don’t understand depressed people and find their screen incarnations terminally annoying, there’s not much to like here. But if you can get past that, the portraits of the three women are genuinely moving and the depiction of depression is one of the best I’ve seen. You really get a sense of how the world just seems to cave in unbidden on people like this, often set off by small things that most of us would just shrug off.
I think I agree that the Ed Harris character wasn’t that good, but he wasn’t on screen all that much anyway. The three stars all gave compelling performances, and that’s what counts. Thumbs up.
