The Hours

Stephen Daldry, 2002 (114 mins, Cert. 12A)

The story of three women searching for more potent, meaningful lives. Each is alive at a different time and place; all are linked by their yearnings and their fears. Virginia Woolf, in a suburb of London in the early 1920’s, is battling insanity as she begins to write her first great novel, “Mrs. Dalloway”. Laura Brown, a wife and mother in Los Angeles at the end of World War Two, is reading “Mrs. Dalloway”, and finding it so revelatory that she begins to consider making a devastating change in her life. Clarissa Vaughan, a contemporary version of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, lives in New York City today, and is in love with her friend Richard, a brilliant poet who is dying of AIDS. Their stories intertwine, and finally come together in a surprising, transcendent moment of shared recognition.
(Film Publicity)

Meryl Streep is astonishingly good as the modern day Mrs Dalloway, Nichole Kidman suitably dramatic as the tormented Woolf and Julianne Moore enigmatic and surprising as the missing link. The film cleverly intertwines the stories of the three women's, very different, lives to illuminate the contrasts and similarities involved. The closeness with which the modern Clarissa's story follows that of her fictional counterpart takes some of the surprise out of the closing scenes but that can't detract from the impact of this complex and intelligent film. One to watch again and again.
(Steve Fagg)

Seen: Wednesday, 19th February, 2003 (UGC Trocadero)