A “Review” of The Hours in the Final Hours of 2025

It’s midday, the last hours of the year slipping quietly and I am trying to write fast enough to make this writing relevant. Who am I racing, really? What difference does it make if I find meaning in these hours before the calendar flips and the world pretends to begin again? Maybe it’s frivolous, but maybe that’s the point—The Hours, after all, argues that time is only trivial if we let it be. Our hours can carry with them all the meaning of a life, should you decide so.

And I decide so.

Why am I watching The Hours as the year closes? Blame serendipity—a message from someone indelible, someone from the strata of my past whose presence lingers even after the closeness has faded. Watched The Hours. Thought of you. How strange and wonderful, to be thought of—to have someone who once knew me so intimately feel a pang of recognition and reach across the void. As I watched, I realized they’re not just a relic of my past. They’re still woven into my present, time folding improbably in on itself. That realization was its own comfort.

I watched the film not out of nostalgia, but to see if, through the lens of this old relationship, it would look different. Would I find myself in the lines, the silences, the quiet panic of the characters? I did. I saw myself in Laura, failing spectacularly to keep herself alive; in Clarissa’s desperate party; in Virginia’s endless war with language and time. But more than that, I found the sender, too—in every cut, every lingering look, every moment when a character reached for another and their hand hovered just above skin. I understood then that this person wasn’t just a ghost of my past. They are still threaded through my present.

Later, I typed out a response, erased it, rewrote it, and let it sit unsent. I didn’t want to risk the delicate balance—to startle the bird of memory from its perch. Instead, I thought about how people stay close even when they drift. How the shape of a life isn’t defined by who is physically present, but by who continues to cast a shadow—by who makes even the smallest act feel observed. There’s comfort in that: imagining someone out there thinking of me, making the hours meaningful simply through the act of remembering.

So I returned to my bed, opened this blank screen, and let myself believe it.

Watching the film, I could hear my mother’s voice in my head—her incredulity if we had been sitting side by side. She would furrow her brow at these women, call them selfish, lost, tragic. Where is God in any of this? she’d ask, genuinely puzzled. But I recognize myself in their longing—the ache to live wholly, so often flattened by circumstance, or worse, by the impossibility of expressing it. There’s relief in seeing that ache mirrored, even when it’s ugly.

At times, I tried to watch the movie through her eyes—not as a call for empathy, but as a warning. A reverse morality play, where unchecked desire curdles into tragedy. The logic is simple: you have a responsibility to those who depend on you. You do not walk out on your child, your spouse, or your own life, no matter how heavy it feels. To do otherwise would be a form of spiritual violence.

I did not envy the women of The Hours their suffering. I do not aspire to their endings. And yet… I identified with these women not because of their circumstances (I have no child to abandon, no legacy to uphold), but because of that private, unspeakable longing to feel something more than what’s allotted. I know, in my bones, how a single hour can expand until it fills the entire horizon, or shrink until it leaves room for nothing but the desperate desire to escape.

I wonder if my mother ever felt this. If she ever wanted, even for a minute, to step out of the life assigned to her. I remember her in the kitchen, hands braced against the counter, steadying herself against a tide none of us could see. Did she ever gaze at the clock and feel herself dissolving into the hours?

The film keeps circling the same question: what do you do with a day?

There’s that scene—was it Kidman or Streep? Maybe both—where a woman stands before a mirror, searching for proof of transformation. It should be profound, but instead it feels almost like a joke, the film winking at the idea that introspection alone could make you new. I caught my own reflection in the laptop screen and tried to see if I looked changed from last year. I didn’t. Not really.

We are drowning in other people’s words about art, about longing, about what it means to be a vessel for feeling. I thought of Aristotle: “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” I wrote it down and let it steady me for a moment.

It was strange to receive that text about The Hours when I did. Earlier, Miami had been radiant—the kind of clarity that makes even Westchester bloom. I took my grandmother to a nail salon, the air a heady swirl of acrylic and acetone, and for a while the place became its own small temple—a court where women’s hours were on full display. A woman on the phone vented about a man returning at year’s end, as if the calendar could wipe everything clean. A manicurist moved through the room, kissing her coworkers’ cheeks so tenderly, all the while missing her mother in Cuba. My grandmother, her eyes wide with amazement, kept searching my face for something, wanting me to notice—what exactly? The Dominican woman smoothing water through a girl’s long, wavy hair before her first blowout. The thousand rituals that anchor us in time.

What ties this to Mrs. Dalloway, to The Hours, to the turning of the year? Maybe only this: the act of attention. Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself—choosing to mark the day, to lend it meaning with her own hands. Or the way Clarissa, at the end of the film, meets her partner’s gaze on the bed: a silent insistence that the mundane and overlooked are worthy of witness. Woolf knew it. Attention is the true subject. The hours only matter if we decide they do.

Later, lying on my bed, I pressed my chest down and imagined the weight of every person I have ever loved. I wanted to scoff at the sentimentality of it, but instead I closed my eyes and let the sensation grow.

The Hours doesn’t answer what makes a life meaningful. It only insists, quietly, that every hour is a chance to ask again. And here, at midday, with the sun pouring in and the last page of the calendar waiting, I decide to ask again too.

But here’s the pulsing little secret, the real Miami heat: The Joyce is the clubhouse you always prayed this city would grow up and get. It is probably the only restaurant in Miami that feels genuinely sexy and cool AND intimate— was it the waitress who was sort of a bitch to my cousin? The Joe Columbo barstools? The desert menu with no prices? The glass encased Picasso? The cute Venezuelan collector I slid passed to get to my seat? The couple at the bar making out so deliciously and proceeded to make their way to the bathroom that remained inaccessible for the rest of the evening??— I never saw them again.

A kaleidoscope of the who’s-who, the almost-someones, and the “don’t-you-know-me-yet?”—all lacquered in good light, lounging on Gio Ponti, with Gaetano Pesci sculptures winking by the bar (spotted while I fumbled my Apple Pay, my actual card appropriately MIA). For all the attitude and price tags, it’s a salon, an anchor, a living room for the city’s hungry, creative heart.

I have been to The Joyce twice before, tucked off Espanola way in the periphery of the very cute Esmé Hotel. The art has been different on both occasions which I’m assuming is on view from one of the owners (Andre Sakhai?) personal collection and the restaurant serves as a sort of rotating gallery. I went on a date with Chef James Taylor after my first visit in July (we were both mutually coerced into going on this date and throughout it were vocal about our lack of time and interest for one another— he is fully committed to being America’s next top Chef and I was too busy nursing my recent separation depression. It was awkward but it was mutual and I left thinking, I think he’ll make it.

As for the food, it’s varied for me. Some things are fantastic and some things have left me wanting... Consistent star players : the hamachi crudo (silken, oceanic, ALIVE!), the chopped iceberg(cold, crisp), the schnitzel (CRUNCH! CRACKLE! BOOM!), the chicken wings, the Joyce burger, the charred Brussel sprouts, the Chicago cut ribeye (perfect). Wait, so maybe the majority of the menu is great but last night, well honestly last night I think blame may fall squarely on Dania’s shoulders —DANIAAAA, oh Christ— who ordered with the culinary vision of a blindfolded toddler. The mains arrived—Madai! Brick chicken! My beloved Schnitzel! Cauliflower!—and everything kinda morphed into a singular taste of Calabrian chile. Mental note: Dania’s ordering privileges? Revoked…forever.

Noticeably absent from last night’s visit to The Joyce was Chef James and I gotta say- his presence adds a bit of magic to the scene. Especially when he comes with some surprise dish or dessert he’s been earnestly laboring over—really, who doesn’t like a little feigned special treatment??? When the bill came I winced, and was annoyed at the amount of chicken that had been ordered. But I say as a non consumer of alcohol I generally feel slighted when it comes to ‘splitting the bill time’ and the general temperament of The Joyce —the art and the people behind it—make me feel like I’d happily get fucked (again!)