Movie Review - The Hours

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Spoiler alerts - 2002 A film with several outstanding women’s roles, and other great performances too. The film covers 24 hours in the lives of three women generations apart, but linked by Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway. The first chronologically is Virginia Wolfe herself (Nicole Kidman) writing the book, which fails to take her mind off attempting suicide (her actual drowning bookends the movie). The second lady is a fan of the novel,(Julianna Moore) struggling to hold her family together in the US in the aftermath of the Second World War, while Meryl Streep is a real-life Mrs Dalloway (with the same first name, Clarissa) in the present day, looking after a friend (the exceptional Ed Harris) who is dying of AIDS (in the novel the character is a shell-shocked soldier). The fates of the three ladies overlap (an aged Moore & Streep eventually meet) and echo across the ages and though neither of the later ladies kill themselves (though both consider it), their futures will not be happy ones. Harris actually gives the best performance as a writer who is in many ways a male Virginia Woolfe, convinced that his pending literary award is just being offered in pity due to his illness rather than down to his talents. Many critics were cruel about Kidman’s prosthetic nose used to make her look more like Woolfe, but it really isn’t as bad as made out and her Oscar winning central role is very well handled in this very beautiful three tier movie. Arthur Chappell