I recently rented “The Hours” from Netflix. It’s an elegant, poignant weaving together of three women’s lives — Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) circa 1921, a Los Angeles housewife named Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) circa 1951 and a New York editor named Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep) circa 2001.

I’m not going to try to do a decent movie review. I usually don’t have the patience for that, and besides, the thing is probably old news to everyone. But there were aspects to their depiction of life (or maybe just women’s lives) that seemed to beg a little closer investigation, so I wanted to give it a little space here.

The common element is sadness. Sadness should get a credit in this movie, and a big one — it could come alphabetically after Moore but before Streep. And we’re not just talking regular everyday sadness here — it’s that full-blown, no-hope, what-the-F-is-the-point Movie-Sadness that the public just can’t seem to get enough of (or so one would think, judging from its predominance in fiction and films). Does life for thoughtful people have to be that flippin’ awful?

There’s not much doubt that for Virginia Woolf it was. I’ve had a kind of fascination with Woolf that’s based much more on her journals, a relative’s biography and her husband’s memoirs than on her writing (which I’ve never had much luck with). There’s no question that Woolf suffered most of her life with the kind of debilitating mental illness that we’re all too familiar with these days — she appears to be a classic manic-depressive type who had breakdowns, hallucinations and delusions that made her attempt suicide more than once. We just have to guess at how much easier her life would’ve been if she’d been prescribed lithium instead of the kinds of trendy cures favored in the ’20s (like being locked into a dark room to remove all sensory stimulation. Sounds horrible.).
And the most contemporary figure, Clarissa Vaughn, has enough going on in her life for anyone watching to start getting edgy — she’s caring for an ex-lover who is dying of AIDS and trying to plan a party for him that no one (including him) seems to be too keen on attending. The imminent death of someone she loved is making her look back at everything she wanted life to be when they were together and everything that will pass away with his passing.

And then we have the housewife. Laura Brown is a pretty woman in her 20’s with a husband who dotes on her and a sensitive little boy about eight who seems to only want to be around her. And yet, it’s obvious from the first scenes that she’s profoundly unhappy and having a hard time functioning. Why exactly? The movie never tries to say, and you end up inferring that it’s just from the crushing weight of being Suburban, a malaise that elitist culture-producers believe causes whole neighborhoods to suffer, expire and commit hate-crimes all the time.

And what ties all the women together? Well, the book, “Mrs. Dalloway”, that Woolf is writing (in the ’20s) which Brown is reading (in the ’50s) and which Vaughn is, in a way, living (in ‘01) is the clearest symbol. But the strongest tie between them has to be the oncoming blackness of their mental state and what they do about it. That’s the amalgam that holds all of the stories together. Virginia suffers and succumbs — Woolf drowned herself in a river at the age of 59. Laura suffers and makes choices (I won’t give any spoilers), and maybe she wins and maybe she loses — you’re not really sure (I think she loses). Clarissa suffers and has a catthartic breakthrough and in the end, you’re made to believe she has won somehow, though I never did understand how. If you blink you miss it, and I must’ve kept blinking.
But somehow the big winner is still Movie-Sadnesss. The lackadaisical attempt at a happy ending is rushed through in a moment, but the camera dotes lovingly at the beginning and ending of the movie on Woolf’s suicide, as if that was the one thing that we could all take strength from. And maybe that’s the way that artistically-minded people see it — in the special featured biography of Virginia Woolf on the DVD, her suicide was described by friends and biographers as “brave” and “courageous.” Brave? It’s a suicide, not the taking of Normandy Beach. I certainly understand the impulse of sympathetic people to say that given her prolonged illness, it was understandable. But making a hero out of her seems to be making a hero out of depression, and that’s a bad idea.

Does it have to be this way? Do great movies, great plays and great works of fiction always have to make it seem like life is so completely onerous, pointless and unrelentingly dreadful that the sanest ones among us are the ones who either go insane or kill themselves?
That’s what seems to be the case. “The Hours” is a beautiful movie. It’s well-acted and well-directed, as near as I can judge. But you’ll want to watch something zany with a laughtrack right after it or, better yet, do a little religious reading. That’s not just an act of denial or contrariness — it’s an act of self-preservation and a reality check, like breaking out a window to keep you from suffocating.