Richimus

     So, I'm not entirely sure where I'm going with this, even after finishing The Hours a while ago, but I wanted to talk about the Richard/Septimus character(s). There's obviously Richard Brown, who shares the name Richard but is similar to Septimus, but there's also his dad, Dan Brown (not the mystery author). For a while, I thought Dan was supposed to be Richard. He's got that general happiness and simplistic lifestyle. He's completely in love with his wife and can't see how unhappy she is. Laura seems to be an ideal to him. He tells the story of how his idea of her got him all the way through the war and back. He has such an abstract idea of this girl he had never really met, but yet he decides to marry her. Similarly, we aren't entirely sure just what about Clarissa Richard's in love with in Mrs. Dalloway.
     We talked about how Clarissa marries Richard because he's the 'safe' choice for her. At the same time, he's in love with her in a way that's not obvious from Clarissa's point of view, or anyone else's. I almost wish that scene where Richard can't quite bring himself to say he loves Clarissa had come up in the movie. The movie characters, however, would not have fit that bill as well. Dan is very open and gushes about his family and how happy he is all the time. I felt like that open gushing would have made it harder for Laura to tell her husband how she was feeling. She really does seem to want to make her family happy (ex. the cake).
     It's pretty obvious that Laura doesn't share the same enthusiasm and love of life that her husband does. At the beginning, she is resting and  sounds tired. She also seems to be forcing a smile for Dan's birthday. Then she almost commits suicide and it's pretty clear that she's an extremely troubled woman. We learn later that she left her family, which is perhaps a much better thing to do, even if Richard's poetry is all about 'that monster'.
     Richard Brown, contrary to what the name suggests, is closer to Septimus. There's the obvious reason of his suicide, but there's also the fact that he is sick. His life is dictated by doctors and pills and Clarissa's visits and her nagging. Septimus' life was also dictated by his caretakers. They both needed people to take care of them, so I'm not saying this aspect was all in their heads, but they both hated the fact that they were dependents. I believe that Richard killed himself for similar reasons as Septimus. Not only did the filmmakers copy that scene almost directly from the book, but Richard even said that his life had lost meaning. He wanted Clarissa to move on.
     Between these two characters, I think we get several aspects of both Richard and Septimus all smushed together and then split differently. Richard Brown was not in the war and is able to explain his unhappiness. Dan Brown has the war experience and the fabulous wife (in his eyes), but he also completely falls apart after she leaves (as we hear Laura hint at later).
     Where some critics argue that Virginia Woolf's whole novel was about making people understand shell shock and recognize it as a real disease, The Hours didn't address that specific problem at all. I didn't think that necessarily took anything away from the story. I was just different and had a different focus. It's their prerogative and I actually liked what they did with the story. For more than half of the movie, however, I was struggling to figure out where the movie was going. That came mostly from not realizing exactly which movie characters were taken directly from the book characters. After finishing the movie, however, I really liked it. I think reading the book beforehand helped me figure things out to some extent, but The Hours really stands on its own.