If Harriet the Spy is the movie that creates English majors, The Hours is the film that cements them into place. To have any feelings for this film apart from deep abiding, melancholy adoration is unacceptable for anyone with a BA in lit. How does it stake itself so firmly as THE epitome of an English major? Let me (and Elizabeth Barrett Browning) count the ways:
1. The entire film centers around Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway, and one of the film’s triptych of stories focuses on Woolf’s (Nicole Kidman) writing of the classic novel.
2. The film is adapted from The Hours by Michael Cunningham, a modern classic in and of itself that won the Pulitzer in 1999.
3. Meryl Streep plays a book editor throwing a party.
4. The party is for her friend, a poet (Ed Harris), who has won a prestigious literary prize but is dying of AIDS.
5. Basically everyone in the movie is queer (Kidman, Streep, Harris, Julianne Moore, Allison Janney, Jeff Daniels), and if a census of my college’s English department means anything, I think a hefty chunk of English majors are queer.
Also, it should be noted that Toni Collette is breathtaking in her one scene. Like some of the finest acting of our generation. Mrs. Collette said she would steal the movie herself!
Watch it on HBO Max.
Source: https://www.buzzfeed.com/matthewhuff/movies-for-the-recovering-english-major
