Despite the self-conscious ruminations of Adaptaion, it’s The Hours that seems to be a textbook problem in adapting a book to the big screen. Only this despite itself. Rule No. 1 in adaptation is Avoid Voiceover Narration. The screenwriter should be able to show what goes on, not merely describe it in words. Perhaps what’s surprising about The Hours is that in taking a book filled with stream-of-consciousness, they stick to the rule. What’s even more surprising is how this seems to hinder the film. Characters seem to be acting with minimal or vague motivation, conversations seem stilted and unreal, and any gay subculture seems evacuated, only to be compensated by from-nowhere lesbian kisses and too many pink triangle stickers on Richard/Ed Harris’s refrigerator.
Maybe this is too harsh an assessment, that I’m expecting the movie to be the book. But the problem may be a theater person’s approach to adaptation (both Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare come from the British theater) versus a cinephile’s approach. Instead of getting truly cinematic equivalents of the narration, something that would let us get some interiority, we get more plot mechanations (too much foreshadowing), more expository dialogue (too much discussion of the theme from characters’ mouths) and more mood (the Philip Glass score is as ham-handed as any John Williams score). The exception was the acting, which for the most part was superb.
David Edelstein of Slate has outlined so many of the things that bothered me. I didn’t find the movie a tedium as he did, and I would reverse his assessment of Streep and Kidman (I thought the former brilliant, but the latter was method acting a bit too much). Still, it’s a bit disappointing to see the potential of a textured book (whatever its faults) reduced to a morality play about how loved ones’ deaths make us value our own.
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