The Hours

In Virginia Woolf's novel 'Mrs Dalloway', as Clarissa Dalloway whiles away the hours preparing for a party, she remembers a passionate affair in her youth as well as a kiss she once exchanged with a female friend; meanwhile on the other side of town a poet who has survived the horrors of World War I succumbs to madness and kills himself.

Mrs Dalloway does not herself appear as a character in 'The Hours', directed by Stephen Daldry and adapted from Michael Cunningham's novel by David Hare. Yet she is nonetheless an important presence in the film - an invisible ghost who haunts the lives of three women from different times and places. The film spans a single day in the life, or life in a day, of each of the three women, all bisexual, all anxious, all reflective, all drowning in the pressures which others place upon them.

In Richmond, England 1923, Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), confined to the country as a cure for her suicidal depression, whiles away the hours preparing a tea party for her sister Vanessa (Miranda Richardson), and planning her new novel, 'Mrs Dalloway'. At one point she thinks her protagonist will commit suicide, but later she changes her mind, resolving that a poet will die instead. She decides to return to her life in London. Eighteen years later, she kills herself.

In Los Angeles, 1951, pregnant housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) whiles away the hours reading 'Mrs Dalloway', and making a cake with her young son Richie for the birthday party of her husband (John C. Reilly). At one point Laura decides to commit suicide, but then she changes her mind.

In New York City, 2001, Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) whiles away the hours preparing a party for Richard (Ed Harris), a gay poet and novelist with whom she had a passionate affair in her youth, and who has since then called her 'Mrs Dalloway'. His latest novel is a barely disguised fictionalisation of the lives of his friends and family, in which 'nothing happens, and then - wham! - she [Richard's mother] kills herself'. Although Richard has survived the horror of AIDS, he succumbs to madness and kills himself. Later that evening, the party cancelled, Clarissa meets Richard's mother and takes stock of her life.

In Daldry's skillful hands, these three lives are interwoven into an elliptical tapestry, overlapping and intruding upon one another with great subtlety. How rare it is to see a film that assumes a modicum of intelligence in its viewers. The themes it explores are life and death, love and loss, and the possibility of survival in memory and literature.

Kidman (with a prosthetic nose designed perhaps to help us forget 'Days of Thunder'), Moore and Streep all give Oscar-winning performances, and are well supported by the rest of the cast. It is ambitious to set a single film in the Twenties, the Fifties and the Noughties, but Daldry has managed to make the period details convincing without ever letting them become distracting.

Give 'The Hours' a couple of your own, and you'll find enough joy and sadness to fill three lifetimes.

Anton Bitel