One of the major characters in The Hours seems to me to be reasonably happy—at least as happy as most people are in their mid-fifties—and that character is Manhattanite book editor Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep). Clarissa, a lesbian, is in her tenth year of a loving relationship with the same partner, and she is on good terms with her college-age daughter. There’s a magic moment when Clarissa tells her daughter how her concept of happiness changed over the years. She recalls how in her young adulthood she woke up one day feeling the world was full of possibility and thought, “So, this is the beginning of happiness. This is where it starts. And, of course, there will always be more.” Then she laughs ruefully and goes on to say, “It never occurred to me it wasn’t the beginning. It was happiness. It was the moment … right then.”
I should mention that the movie The Hours is adapted from the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title by Michael Cunningham.
The DVD containing The Hours comes with some nice extras. There are two feature-length audio commentary tracks and four featurettes, including one on The Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf. I’ve listed the DVD’s special features below.
Selected Special Features on the DVD:
- Anamorphic Widescreen (1.85:1)
- English 5.0 Surround
- English Dolby Surround
- French Dolby Surround
- English Subtitles
- Commentary by Director Stephen Daldry and Novelist Michael Cunningham
- Commentary by Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Nicole Kidman
- Filmmakers Introduction
- Featurette: Three Women
- Featurette: The Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf
- Featurette: The Music of The Hours
- Featurette: The Lives of Mrs. Dalloway
- Theatrical Trailer
