The Hours

In our latest Film Studies series, filmmaker and educator Patricia Gruben – founder of the Praxis Centre for Screenwriters – unpacks different approaches to writing for the screen, focusing here on adaptation from literary sources.

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) was a milestone in the development of stream of consciousness narrative, which has been difficult to translate into cinema for obvious reasons; Marleen Gorris’s faithful 1997 adaptation illuminates the challenge. Stephen Daldry took it a step further, working with playwright David Hare on the screenplay for Michael Cunningham’s novel The Hours, which approaches the subject by focusing not on Woolf’s novel itself so much as on its impact; it cycles through the last days of the author Woolf (Nicole Kidman), a desperate, devoted reader in the 1950’s (Julianne Moore) and a contemporary literary agent (Meryl Streep) who embodies Clarissa Dalloway in her anxious concern for the troubled souls around her.

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Director Stephen Daldry employs the wonderful things cinema can do in order to realize aspects of The Hours that Cunningham could only hint at or approximate on the page. The result is something rare, especially considering how fine the novel is, a film that’s fuller and deeper than the book … It’s marvelous to watch the ways in which [David Hare] consistently dramatizes the original material without compromising its integrity or distorting its intent … Cunningham’s [novel] touched on notes of longing, middle-aged angst and the sense of being a small consciousness in the midst of a grand mystery. But Daldry and Hare’s [film] sounds those notes and sends audiences out reverberating with them, exalted.

Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle

Patricia Gruben is a filmmaker and former associate professor of film at Simon Fraser University, as well as founder and long-time director of Praxis Centre for Screenwriters (now the Screenwriters Lab at the Whistler Film Festival.) Her films have been screened at TIFF, VIFF, Sundance and the New York Film Festival, and her writing on film has appeared in international academic and popular journals. Her new feature film Heart of Gold will be released in 2025.