At this point, I’m not quite sure
what my bookie would actually say now that I’ve watched the film, The Hours.
Of my predictions from the previous blog post, I think they all came partially
true, but I wasn’t able to get any of my “bets” one hundred percent correct. I
guess this is why Stephen Daldry was asked to direct the film and not a
seventeen-year-old girl from the Midwest. However, I am proud to say that I
think I got the general gist of what Daldry was trying to do with this
adaption.
In my world, a gambler finds out how
much money they’ve won or lost only after they know the end results (this is
due to the fact that I never mentioned how much money I was betting in my last
blog post). So, I think I deserve 50 dollars for guessing that the director
would keep the braided narrative style in the movie. This was easy to predict
because the three different perspectives were very important to the development
of the story in the novel. Without braiding the narratives together, both the
movie and the book would lose the seamless flow of the plot that keeps our
interest by slowly connecting the dots for us.
Speaking of seams, I also won 200
dollars for my prediction on the transitions from one perspective to the other.
When going from scene to scene, the camera either focused in on an object or a
face, changing the background around our focus point. Daldry even took my idea
of using the yellow roses as a makeshift Alice in Wonderland keyhole from one
“world” to the next. However, instead of connecting Clarissa’s flowers to the
birthday cake, we followed a bouquet of yellow roses travel from Virginia’s
hands to Clarissa’s to Laura’s. However, Daldry makes the big bucks due to the
other transitions that were much less predictable, but all the more brilliant.
For example, the use of the three different alarm clocks waking the three
leading ladies up in the beginning was clever in that it reminded us of the
presence of the fourth leading lady: time. As each woman slapped their alarm
clocks silent, I felt like they all clicked on a stopwatch, and was aware of
the measure of time for the film as well. Daldry also used the actual prose
from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway as a transition, as Virginia, then
Laura, then Clarissa repeated a line about going out to get some flowers. This
moment felt synchronized, like clockwork, and helped grab my attention very
early on.
I don’t put the 250 dollars in my
pocket, however, because my third “bet” went sour. If you’ve ever seen the
movie The Blindside, you’ll remember
that scene when Mr. Touhy asks, “How’d those words taste coming out of your
mouth?” to which Mrs. Touhy responds with, “like vinegar.” As hard as it is to say, I was wrong. Daldry
did not show us Laura Brown’s attempted suicide. In fact, he even cuts this
information from the movie entirely. Since this was a fairly large risk for me
to take, I think I am now collectively 1,000 dollars in the hole. Being wrong
stings.
However, I’d like to think that I
had the same idea as Daldry. With a plot that seems trivial from the outside
(triviality being a theme in both the novel and the film), the job of the
screenwriter and director is to make sure that the audience is engaged for the
entire one hundred and ten minutes. In multiple scenes in the movie, I noticed
where Daldry had stretched Cunningham’s original story in order to create more
conflict. This stuck out to me when Richie was helping his mother bake the
cake. In the book, Richie talks much less and is repeatedly said to be nervous
of making a mistake. This contrasts the movie, in which Richie seems more
confident, even reminding his mother to grease the pan before baking. While
this definitely created more intensity in the scene, it also changed Richie’s
relationship with his mother.
In Virginia Woolf’s world, Daldry
and writer David Hare incorporate a scene where Nelly, the chef at Virginia’s
home, is complaining about Virginia to another servant, and Virginia overhears.
This is portrayed as Virginia’s internal self-consciousness around the help
instead of an external conflict. Therefore, Daldry is able to convey the same
idea, yet in a way that is easy to see on screen. He even uses an egg cracking
on the side of a bowl to mark this tension, emphasizing the awkward pauses
between Virginia and Nelly as they talk about what’s for lunch. With such
intricate details, Daldry and the team working behind him is able to make a
seemingly ordinary day into a movie that keeps you on the edge of your seat.
A knack for finding themes and
showing them in a new way seems to be essential for a screenwriter or director
upon adapting a novel to screen. Both Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Michael
Cunningham’s The Hours had a potential to make very slow, boring movies.
Yet, by magnifying the small details, Daldry is able to make me see the raging
soap opera in our day-to-day lives, and leaves me satisfied, despite the fact
that I am now 1,000 dollars in debt.
MOVIES WATCHED: 8
SCREENPLAY PAGES WRITTEN: 18
NOVEL PAGES WRITTEN: 60
PAGES LEFT IN MISS PEREGRINE’S HOME FOR
PECULIAR
CHILDREN: 170
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