Adaptations of popular novels like A Simple Plan have been a staple of Hollywood filmmaking almost from the dawn of movies. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, as the studios attempt to invest their high-risk budgets in low-risk stories vetted by their success in another medium, they turn increasingly to established novels over original spec scripts.
So-called literary novels, however, rarely get made into movies. For one thing, literary fiction isn’t terribly accessible or popular—so much so that popular (or mass-market) and literary fiction are considered separate categories in the publishing world. That lack of mass readership is a problem for filmmakers. After all, it costs tens of millions of dollars to produce a movie, and that means millions of people will have to buy tickets—or DVDs—or the investors lose money.
If that weren’t barrier enough, there is the problem of adaptation. Internal action, the hallmark of quality contemporary fiction, presents a thorny problem for screenwriters. Even popular writers like Stephen King spend a lot of time inside their characters’ heads. Often, it’s the characters’ thoughts, as much as their actions, that make the story compelling. Literary fiction can be so internal that sometimes it seems to boast no “action” at all. But short of laying voice-over narration on top of the action—a risky strategy for even the best screenwriters—how does a movie reveal those thoughts to the audience?
And then there’s the problem of genre. Movie studios love genre categories, because they make movies easier to market. Yet literary fiction eschews genre. In one NPR commentary, critic Andrei Codrescu spoke repeatedly of the genre-bending literary novel, as if genre-bending were what makes modern literature, well, literature.
The Hours is a perfect example. In this acclaimed novel, writer Michael Cunningham reimagines Virginia Woolf ’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Cunningham weaves together the stories of three women in three far-flung locales and time periods, linked primarily through Woolf ’s book. It’s a literary novel based on another literary novel, and it glorifies reading and the power of literature. It’s not light or upbeat, at least on the surface; death hangs over the story like the promise of a chill November downpour. The Yale Book Review called The Hours “one of the most daunting literary projects imaginable.” And, just as Codrescu might have predicted, it’s a genre-bender if ever there was one.
The Hours earned extraordinary acclaim, to be sure: The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the PEN/Faulkner Award, it was named a Best Book of 1998 by the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, and Chicago Tribune. Yet most people thought it was unfilmable.
To work as a movie, The Hours needed a very special kind of writer: someone who liked and trusted actors, who could write roles they’d line up to play. A demanding maverick, uninterested in regurgitating Hollywood formulas. An artist in his or her own right, who could stand in line with Virginia Woolf and Michael Cunningham without being either intimidated or dwarfed by them.
Enter David Hare.
No genre? No problem. For Hare, who’s written nine Broadway plays, that’s what drew him to the project in the first place. “I think that the cinema is dying from this exhaustion of genre,” Hare said. “Cinema just gets duller and duller as it settles into genre. Every movie you go to, you know within two minutes what genre it’s in. It’s an action movie, it’s a teenage comedy movie, it’s a thriller, it’s a film noir. Nearly all the cinema to which I’m responding now,” he said, “can’t instantly [be] consigned to genre.”
The Hours, in Hare’s view, was “not a women’s picture, it’s not a literary picture, it’s not a heritage picture, it’s just very, very unusual. Whether you like it or dislike it, it’s of its own kind. You can’t compare it to similar movies. There are no similar movies.”
To many in Hollywood, that might sound like a death sentence; after all, it’s a longtime convention that pitching involves making your story sound like a “fresh” combination of tried-and-true ideas: “It’s 8 Mile crossed with Spider-Man, with a nod to Harry Potter.” Tell a producer “There are no similar movies,” and you might expect, oh so gently, to be shown the door.
But Hare, of course, is not of Hollywood. He’s a man of the theater, of London and New York, of a world where the writer’s words are king, and if they’re good, they can last for centuries. He was just the man to make The Hours work, and he did. His script snared three of the English-speaking world’s best movie actresses—Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore—and one of the year’s most accomplished ensemble casts. It also secured him an Oscar nomination for best adapted screenplay (though he lost to Ron Harwood and The Pianist).
The genesis of The Hours, of course, lay with Virginia Woolf herself and her first great novel, Mrs. Dalloway. In the early 1920s, Woolf penned the story of a single day in the life of an upper-class Englishwoman as she plans and prepares a party for her husband, Richard. The conceit of the book is that all of the eponymous Clarissa Dalloway’s life, from her memory of a single passionate kiss with another schoolgirl to her acceptance of death, can be encapsulated in just one day. Woolf was ahead of her time: Decades before the phrase “chaos theory” became a buzzword, Woolf was already exploring a key concept of fractals: that the whole can be found in the part.
Woolf battled depression and mental illness her entire life; feeling her sanity slipping away, she committed suicide in 1941. Decades later, a copy of her work fell into the hands of an American high school student named Michael Cunningham. “Mrs. Dalloway was the first great book I ever read,” recalled Cunningham. “I was more interested in rock ’n’ roll and smoking cigarettes. Then this girl I liked a great deal sort of became exasperated with my stupidity, and shoved this copy of Mrs. Dalloway at me, and said, ‘Here, read this and try to be less stupid.’ I wasn’t positive I wanted to be less stupid, but I wanted to give it a try.
“So I read the book and of course I didn’t understand it, but I did get the complexity and density and beauty of those sentences, and they were a revelation. I remember thinking, She’s doing with language something like what Hendrix does with a guitar. It opened up the world of books to me. I wasn’t opposed to books before. I just thought they were sort of dusty old things that were kept in book cemeteries. From Mrs. Dalloway, I learned that they can be living, active, ongoing parts of our consciousness.”
Later, Cunningham read Hermione Lee’s biography of Woolf, which made the writer and her life even more intriguing for him. The experience inspired him to write a present-day version of Mrs. Dalloway, taking the title of his book, The Hours, from Woolf ’s original working title.
The Hours does more than update Woolf ’s story; it extends her conceit, a woman’s life revealed in the course of a single day, to three women: Woolf herself, who faces a crisis with her husband, Richard, over a day during the writing of Mrs. Dalloway in 1923; a housewife named Laura Brown in 1951 Los Angeles, whose life is altered forever one day as she reads Mrs. Dalloway; and a book editor named Clarissa Vaughn, a contemporary version of the Mrs. Dalloway character. Clarissa revisits the entire arc of her life over a single day as she plans a party for her AIDS-stricken former lover, Richard.
Writer, reader, character: These three story lines show the relevance of Woolf ’s ideas across generations and reveal the power of a book to change our lives.
“It can sound like a kind of dry, academic exercise, to write a book based on another book,” said Cunningham. “But for those of us who love books, certain books have been huge, cathartic, deeply emotional experiences. The fact that some girl was mean to you in college or the fact that your father was occasionally cranky when he got home from work are suitable subjects for a novel, and the first time you read Tolstoy is not, seems odd to me. It seems to underestimate what books and art in general can do. I did want to write a book about how much reading can mean.”
For the writer essaying an adaptation, however, this does present a paradox. The Hours is, at least in part, about the power of literature. So when a reader enjoys the book, he’s sharing the same experience as Laura Brown and can be moved in exactly the same way. It’s a powerful structure that helps draw the reader into the story.
Movies sometimes use similar scenes to great effect. What movie lover doesn’t relate to the early scenes of The Purple Rose of Cairo, as Mia Farrow flees her awful home life by going to the movies? Watching The Green Mile, only the flintiest heart could fail to be moved by the grin on doomed Michael Clarke Duncan’s face as he watches and enjoys his first and only picture show—a Fred Astaire musical.
But those are movies within movies. The Hours had a book within a book. A book within a movie? Problematic. Is there anything less “cinematic” than watching someone read? It’s yet another reason most thought the book was unfilmable.
Yet Scott Rudin thought otherwise. Before The Hours won its awards, Rudin saw a movie in it and decided to send it to David Hare, then best known as a playwright. By 2003 Hare had had nine plays produced on Broadway, including Plenty, The Blue Room, and Via Dolorosa. Many have included great roles for actresses; Meryl Streep had appeared in the film of Plenty, while Nicole Kidman earned great reviews in The Blue Room in London and New York. He wrote the film Damage for director Louis Malle, and wrote and directed Wetherby in 1985, but he generally prefers playwriting to screenwriting.
Rudin had come to know Hare while producing some of Hare’s plays on Broadway. “Scott knew how reluctant I am to work in the cinema,” said Hare. “But he was convinced that this was something I would want to do, and he was right.”
Coincidentally, Hare works in a former artist’s studio in London that was once used by a member of the Bloomsbury Group, Woolf ’s creative circle. More important, he saw that—despite the doubters—there was a movie in this book. “In fact,” he said, The Hours was based on what he considered “a very cinematic idea, which is: There are three stories, you don’t understand the way in which they connect, and you play and tease with the idea that they will eventually connect. And when they connect, I hope it’s satisfying to understand the way in which they connect.” (The same interwoven story lines approach has been used to great effect in recent years, including Traffic[2000], Crash [2004], and Babel [2006].)
Hare began developing the script with Rudin and fellow producer Robert Fox in 1999. Hare began by having exactly one meeting with Cunningham. “He talked to me for six hours. I just let him talk,” recalled Hare. It turned out that Cunningham had originally written a much longer book, which included detailed histories for all of the characters, and Hare was able to pick Cunningham’s brain about even the most intimate details of the characters’ lives.
The questions gave Cunningham great confidence in Hare. “He knew exactly the things to be talking about before you work on a screenplay,” said the novelist. “It was not so much particulars of the story and how to manage the transition from one medium to the other as, who are these people? Where do they come from and how did they get to be the way they are? You need tons of knowledge about that to produce a character who feels plausibly alive, even though the audience doesn’t get anything like the information you’ve got in mind.” Before they parted, Hare remembered, Cunningham gave Hare his blessing. “[Michael] said something wonderful to me,” said Hare, “which was, ‘I’ve done one thing with this material; I now leave you free to do something else.’ That was a wonderful act of trust from the author of a book to a screenwriter.” From then on, Hare worked only with Rudin and Fox.
Besides the structure, there were some elements of the story he was determined to preserve. One was the characters’ fluid sexuality. “The characters are neither gay nor straight,” said Hare. “On the contrary, sexuality is almost an electric charge which at any point can suddenly flow between two characters of either sex, almost arbitrarily. There was a modernity to the sexuality that I thought was very original, and which we haven’t seen a lot of in the contemporary cinema.”
He also wanted to maintain the pleasure a reader feels in watching how the story lines, which seem so irreconcilably separate, eventually mesh and become one. “It’s like watching a machine, like taking the lid off a watch that works. The moment when you learn that Ed Harris is actually Julianne Moore’s son is the moment the tumblers fall into place and the safe opens. And there’s a great mechanical pleasure in that, I hope.”
There would have to be changes, though, too. The book reveals Clarissa’s memories of a summer when, as a young woman, she lived in a ménage à trois with Richard and another man, Louis. Hare spent his three years on the project fighting to keep those scenes out of the movie.
“By and large, our memories of how our most powerful feelings are exist in our heads. I think by embodying those memories in corny pictures of people running along seashores, you don’t do them any service. I wanted to summon them up with words and the actors’ intensity, not with a whole bunch of young people who don’t even look like the young Meryl Streep and the young Ed Harris and the young Jeff Daniels. It just seemed to be a nightmare to go down that course.”
The story’s intricate three-sided structure also dictated cuts. One of Woolf ’s themes was that all lives are interconnected. To develop that idea in the screenplay, Hare needed to pare away anything in a given story that didn’t somehow connect to the other two stories. That meant that many subplots had to go, especially one involving Clarissa Vaughn’s daughter. “In the book,” he said, “she’s being besieged by a gay woman teacher at her university who is desperately in love with her and who makes Clarissa feel very bourgeois. So there’s an argument there about whether sexual politics is or isn’t radical politics. I simply didn’t see how I could incorporate that in a way that illuminated all three stories.”
Hare also realized that while two of the story lines are inherently dramatic, the third is not. In 1923, Virginia Woolf is either going to leave the suburbs—or kill herself. In 1951, Laura Brown realizes she is going to have to either leave her family—or kill herself. In 2001, Clarissa Vaughn is going to host a party—and it could be spoiled.
“So to me,” said Hare, “the texture of [the third] story was harder to find, because it is essentially Richard who is the suicidal character, not Clarissa Vaughn. [I had to] make Clarissa’s story seem not self-indulgent. After all, she’s a rich, well-off person in a stable relationship, with a lovely daughter. What’s her problem? The cinema audience could easily have become impatient of her, compared with the terrible problems that Laura Brown and Virginia Woolf are facing. So balancing out the modern story with the two old stories was for me the biggest challenge of the screenplay.” In the end Clarissa’s story turns out to be the most dramatic of all.
The internal-action problem plagued Hare for months. In Cunningham’s book, like Woolf ’s, the reader knows what Virginia, Laura, and Clarissa are thinking. Hare wrestled for months with the challenge of bringing their thoughts onto the screen. For a while, it looked like a voice-over narration would be inevitable, but he was determined to avoid it. That meant inventing new scenes and illuminating bits of business that weren’t in the novel.
“That’s the whole challenge of it,” said Hare. “You know what Meryl was going through by the way she walked through the streets. Or you put in scenes of the party planning and so forth. Those are all my scenes, not Michael’s scenes, but if you forgo the right to go into somebody’s head, then you’ve got to write new events.”
Hare said he had to invent such new elements for each of the stories. “In Laura Brown’s case, there’s a sequence of cross-cutting where she’s driving and her son is building a toy house. It represents his connection to his mother, his need for his mother, which I couldn’t write in the way Michael could, by slapping it down in prose. The film is full of those completely invented sections to illustrate what is going on inside the characters.”
He invented a birthday party scene in the 1950s story, in which Dan Brown, Laura’s husband, explains the vision of happiness that led him from his service in World War II to this tidy home and family. The irony, of course, is that by the time this scene plays out, we know that Laura is miserable beyond words. It’s one of the story’s unifying themes: that we all make choices for happiness, but those choices often make those around us miserable. The characters in The Hours discuss their moments of happiness, usually in the past, or their longing for it, in words that echo from story to story. Those echoes, and small bits of action that echo in the three stories as well, help give the screenplay a coherence it might otherwise have lacked.
“It’s a Piece of Music”
DAVID HARE ON SILENCES AND MUSIC IN FILM
As a writer, how do you work with silences, with what’s left unsaid?
That’s what the great actors do for you. When Virginia Woolf goes out into the garden and is suddenly looking at that little girl and the dead bird so intently, we very deliberately [included] a great deal of dialogue on either side of those moments, and then there’s silence, and the intensity of the silence. That only works if you’ve got an actress like Nicole Kidman who can deliver the intensity of the silence, but all that silence is always planned. You can only achieve it by contrasting it with periods of great kerfuffle and bubble. That’s what screenwriting is, isn’t it?
You talk as if the screenplay is a musical composition.
Basically. It’s a piece of music, and that’s why finding a composer was the most difficult thing with this movie. I kept saying I don’t know how anybody’s going to score this movie, because score is the thing that defines genre. The minute James Horner comes crashing in on Titanic, you know, “Oh, this is going to be a period romance.” As soon as Hans Zimmer produces those wonderful bass notes, you know, “Oh, it’s an action thriller.” What was difficult was to find a composer who was not going to confine this film to genre. You had to find someone who was an artist, rather than a pasticheur. And the music is not pastiche. It’s not there to define genre. I haven’t spoken to Philip Glass, but I knew it would be a very, very difficult film to score, because he’d have to work around my music.
I think that music is a real problem now in the movies. Everybody—actors, director, writer, everybody—works with so much subtlety, and then at the last moment somebody comes along and pours so much sauce over everything. The meal is just drowned out in this brown gravy that is now poured over the movies all the time. I think it’s insulting to the composer and insulting to the actors.
“David handled the transitions from one story to the other brilliantly,” said Michael Cunningham. “I think it’s one of those things that feels effortless in the movie because he went through a great deal of trouble.”
In the long run, though, Hare admitted that making sense of the links between the stories and the transitions between them actually took a great deal of trial and error.
“At the point where you don’t understand where the three stories connect, you have to make connections that the audience instinctively feels are moving the story forward, even though they don’t yet quite know how.” These connections are enhanced by images that repeat from story to story: Every story sees a character crack an egg or drop a shoe.
Hare also juxtaposed long scenes with much shorter ones. He points to Clarissa’s first scene with Richard, which lasts almost twenty minutes. “Everybody said, ‘Oh, we’ll shoot it, but of course it won’t appear in the final film in its full form.’ Well, it’s pretty close to its full form [in the final cut].” Similarly, the end of the film features a very long scene between Virginia and her husband, Richard. “I deliberately wanted to jumble up, to work the way Virginia Woolf worked—very, very short scenes sometimes with very, very long scenes. This film is marked out by far longer scenes than movies usually support.”
Hare did send the script to Cunningham at one point, and the pair recall only one note, which actually led to a lingering argument. In Cunningham’s book, when Laura Brown goes to a hotel, she brings bottles of pills and realizes that she really is capable of killing herself. The realization was too subtle and internal for film, so Hare had Laura find a gun in the house and bring it with her to the hotel. Cunningham didn’t buy it.
“I said, ‘There’s only one thing: I don’t know about the gun,’” said Cunningham. “But [Hare and director Stephen Daldry] both felt fairly insistent about it, and I felt pretty insistent about how wrong it seemed. Because she wouldn’t shoot herself—that’s just not something this woman would do. She wouldn’t maim herself like that. She wouldn’t do that to the people who’d find her. She wouldn’t do that to the linens.
“And they wouldn’t even have a gun in the house. The more this went on, the more I began to think that because David [Hare] and Stephen [Daldry] are both English, they actually think all Americans are packing all the time. I don’t remember if I said this or just thought it, but I have some recollection of saying to David, ‘You actually think that if this argument goes on much longer, I’m going to pull out my gun and shoot you, don’t you?’”
Hare’s version won out—until Julianne Moore weighed in. “She said, ‘I don’t see this, I don’t think I can play it,’” said Cunningham. “When you’re losing an argument,” he added with a laugh, “try to get a movie star on your side.”
Hare worked for a year, writing alone, getting notes from Rudin and Fox. Now and then he assembled a cast of New York actors for a group reading, so he could hear the words read aloud and get a sense of how it worked. Only when they were satisfied with the script did they approach Stephen Daldry to direct. Daldry was best known for 2000’s Billy Elliot, but like Hare, he had received his greatest acclaim in the theater. His revisionist production of An Inspector Calls won him a Tony Award and had a long run in London’s West End. He had also directed Hare’s one-man show, Via Dolorosa, which Hare performed in London and on Broadway.
With Daldry on board, work continued as the cast was assembled. Moore had fallen in love with the book and jumped at the chance to play Laura. In fact, Hare said that Moore really wanted to play the character in the book more than the character in his screenplay. Meryl Streep, on the other hand, loved the book just as much, but worked strictly according to the screenplay.
That helped build a give-and-take with Hare. Daldry and the actors went through an unusually long rehearsal period before shooting started, helping Hare and Daldry to refine the cuts and transitions between the stories. The process also gave Hare the chance to incorporate the actors’ performances.
“One of the great pleasures of this film is that [when you’re working] with so many great actors, once you see a rehearsal you want to change the scene because of what they can express or bring to it without words, or with different words. If you watch Meryl Streep rehearse, you’re a fool if you don’t tailor what you’re doing to what she can bring to it—the extra dimension she can add to it through her gifts.” Hare refers to this process as “bespoke tailoring.”
“Normally you have to be the director” to have that luxury, Hare noted.
“It’s more cumbersome, and it requires a great level of collaboration, which I don’t think I could have done if I didn’t know Stephen so well and he hadn’t directed me as an actor.”
He calls his arrangement on the film “utopian.” He was included for the entire process, including filming and post-production. “I’ve been treated better than any screenwriter could reasonably ask to be treated, and not a single word has gone into the picture that wasn’t my word,” he said.
When I spoke with Hare and Cunningham in mid-October 2002, they had not yet discussed the film. Hare suspected that Cunningham would be uncomfortable with the additions and changes, but in fact he was delighted.
“I may be the only novelist who’s completely happy with a movie made out of his book. They did a great job. That’s one of the things I have loved about this experience, from writing it on to this moment: the idea that an impulse that started with Virginia Woolf almost a hundred years ago just lives on and on and on, and keeps changing and keeps evolving, and stays in some ways the same and becomes in other ways enormously different. I think it is a huge tribute to the notion that there are great works of art that just stay alive, long after the people that produce them are gone.”
One of Hare’s changes involved a subtle bit of poetic license. The film is bracketed by scenes of Woolf ’s suicide; the only dialogue in these scenes is Woolf ’s suicide note, read by Kidman, in the film’s only voice-over narration. The screenplay’s final words tie the film together like a final musical coda, echoing words and themes from earlier in the film—even the title.
Yet those final words are not in the published version of Woolf ’s suicide note. Asked about where the lines came from and who wrote them, Hare grew uncharacteristically quiet. “Oh dear,” he said after a long pause. “Well, this is not a question I looked forward to being asked.
“I wrote it,” he finally confessed. “I wanted to restate the spirit of the suicide note, but I didn’t want to use exactly the same words. So I was faced with what I regarded as a moral problem, which was, could I write a piece of Virginia Woolf that’s not by Virginia Woolf? I’m not wholly at peace with it.
“The issue is, are you trying to deceive an audience into thinking that it’s by Virginia Woolf? Because otherwise, I play completely fair, by the rules. When I read extracts, the extracts are authentic. In that case I’d written a piece of Virginia Woolf that I think is true to the spirit of what she felt, but she didn’t write it, and that does bother me.”
For what it’s worth, Cunningham was pleasantly surprised by the moment. “If asked before they shot the movie, I would have said no, I think it’s a bad idea. Then, when I saw that scene in the movie, it seemed perfect and dead right—which, if nothing else, gave me to understand that there are sort of different laws of physics at work in the movies.”
For Hare, though, there’s also the knowledge that movies become history, and that some non-scholars in future years may conclude that those final lines were the last thing Virginia Woolf ever wrote. Some console Hare by reminding him that The Hours, the movie, has its own integrity as a work of art, apart from Cunningham’s novel, Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway, and the true events of Woolf ’s own life. But Hare still struggles with the idea of passing his own words off as Woolf ’s.
“I’d be a bit pissed off at having lines attributed to me that I didn’t write. Particularly if I were Virginia Woolf, who struggled so hard to write exactly what she wanted to write and nothing else.
“I apologize to her ghost.”
Evening
CREDITS
DIRECTED BY Lajos Koltai
SCREENPLAY BY Susan Minot and Michael Cunningham
NOVEL BY Susan Minot
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Michael Cunningham, Jill Footlick, Michael Hogan, Robert
Kessel, Susan Minot
CO-PRODUCERS: Luke Parker Bowles and Nina Wolarsky
PRODUCER: Jeff Sharp
ORIGINAL MUSIC BY Jan A.P. Kaczmarek and Piotr Tatarski
CINEMATOGRAPHY BY Gyula Pados
FILM EDITING BY Allyson C. Johnson
CASTING BY Kerry Barden, Billy Hopkins, Suzanne Smith
PRODUCTION DESIGN BY Caroline Hanania
ART DIRECTION BY Jordan Jacobs
SET DECORATION BY Catherine Davis
COSTUME DESIGN BY Ann Roth
MAJOR AWARDS
Not available at press time
CAST
Claire Danes…YOUNG ANN
Toni Collette…NINA
Vanessa Redgrave…ANN GRANT LORD
Patrick Wilson…HARRIS ARDEN
Hugh Dancy…BUDDY WITTENBORN
Natasha Richardson…CONSTANCE LORD
Mamie Gummer…YOUNG LILA WITTENBORN
Eileen Atkins…MRS. BROWN
Meryl Streep…LILA WITTENBORN
Glenn Close…MRS. WITTENBORN
BUSINESS DATA
ESTIMATED BUDGET: N/A
RELEASE DATE: June 29, 2007
U.S. GROSS: $12.5 million
FOREIGN GROSS: $1.7 million (incomplete)
REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
“The immediate problem with this ambitious, elliptical film is Koltai and editor Allyson C. Johnson’s difficulty in establishing a narrative rhythm, as the back-and-forth shifts in time that seemed delicately free-associative on the page are rendered with considerably less grace onscreen. In ways reminiscent of Stephen Daldry’s film of The Hours, the telling connections between past and present feel calculated rather than authentically illuminating.”
—JUSTIN CHANG, VARIETY
“This is one of the rare movies that are too sensitive for their own good. In the course of it, in both the past and the present, all the characters have to spill their feelings about everyone else, and the pileup of hurt, rue, and guilt—confessions and reconciliations and partings—becomes oppressive. The structure that the filmmakers have created is too complicated and fussy for their fairly simple story and what it has to say about time and memory, and some of Koltai’s directorial touches, such as a scene in which Redgrave imagines herself chasing little white moths in her bedclothes, turn poetry into kitsch.”
—DAVID DENBY, NEW YORKER