The Hours. Directed by Stephen Daldry. Written by David Hare, based on the novel by Michael Cunningham. With Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, Ed Harris, John C. Reilly, Toni Collette, Miranda Richardson, Claire Danes, Stephen Dillane, Allison Janney, and Jeff Daniels. A Paramount Pictures release (120 minutes). At the Showcase (Warwick and Seekonk Route 6).

Who's as frayed as Virginia Woolf? Lots of people, apparently. The Hours tells the stories of three women, including the British author, each at the end of her rope. That these somber situations make for a suspenseful, exciting, even uplifting spectacle is an astonishing and moving triumph.

Based on Michael Cunningham's 1998 novel, which in turn was inspired by Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, The Hours updates Woolf's modernist project of showing the drama inherent in even one day in the interior life of an ordinary person. The film interlaces the parallel stories of a day in each of three lives: Woolf herself (Nicole Kidman), on the day in 1923 that she starts to write the novel; 1950s California housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), who reads Woolf's book while preparing with her little boy to celebrate her husband's birthday; and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a present-day Manhattan book editor, who is scrambling to arrange a party at her home, like namesake Clarissa Dalloway.

As the hours of each woman's day pass, the movie cross-cuts among them to show each coming to a crisis point, reaching out in desperation to another person, reevaluating her own unfulfilled life, and changing that life irrevocably by leaping into the unknown. In Woolf's case, it means breaking free of the isolation of the lifeless London suburb to which husband Leonard has exiled them in order to preserve her tenuous mental health. For Laura, it's confronting the feeling that she's trapped in a domestic life that's destroying her by suppressing yearnings she can't even name. And for Clarissa, it's recognizing that her clinging attachment to old flame Richard (Ed Harris), a poet who's dying of AIDS, has been more detrimental than helpful to both of them.

Haunted by self-destruction, AIDS, mental illness, and collapsed birthday cakes, The Hours may be the feel-bad movie of the season, and that's saying a lot in a season that's included movies as bleak as Far from Heaven, About Schmidt, Solaris, and Pinocchio. Mrs. Dalloway, too, was a story haunted by regret and the specter of suicide, but that was balanced by the sense that each of us, no matter how isolated, is connected to a larger world. The movie's structure, as calibrated by director Stephen Daldry and screenwriter David Hare, makes those connections explicit, usually through repeated (and sometimes obvious) imagery -- a bouquet of flowers, the cracking of eggs. (This is your brain. This is your brain on suicidal depression. Any questions?) But the structure also makes for dramatic tension and suspense, as disaster looms for each woman.

The Hours is replete with unassailable and surprising performances, from the supporting players (particularly Harris, unusually mordant as the stricken poet, and Toni Collette, as a friend of Laura's who has her own painful secret) to the three leads. Streep is her typically inventive self, creating drama in a role whose inner conflict might otherwise go unseen. Moore, in a more intense variation on her Far from Heaven role, plays Laura like a sleepwalker trying to awaken from a nightmare, and her scenes with the remarkable child actor (Jack Rovello) who plays her son are heartbreaking.

Most striking, though is Kidman, who has made a career out of charismatic portrayals of often unlikable characters (from To Die For to last year's Birthday Girl). She disappears into the role of Woolf, not just because of the putty nose and the wig that disguise her appearance, but because she draws on some deep reserve of power that bubbles up through her unearthly stare and makes her scenes, whether she's raging or in good humor, scary and exciting.

Despite its focus on women, this is not a chick flick, in the Ya-Ya Sisterhood sense, of easy, self-congratulatory, women-rock-men-are-pigs sentiment. It's a film about feelings of entrapment and desperation that anyone can recognize, one that says that those who have such grim, solitary feelings are not alone. It takes a certain bravery not just to make such a movie but to assert, as characters in all three segments do, that there's something heroic in opting out, in dying. Then again, the movie also makes the case that there's something even more heroic in opting in, in living.

Nicole and the nose
NEW YORK -- In the end, questions always return to "The Nose." Not only did the prosthetic proboscis help transform Nicole Kidman into Virginia Woolf in The Hours, it also rendered her unrecognizable as a Hollywood glamor girl. It's just this sort of surrender of vanity that's considered daring for movie stars, that makes performances, that wins trophies.

Kidman herself acknowledges as much. "As an actor, you can't have vanity. Your body is your slate, it's your tool, it's your instrument, and it's there to be changed and broken down and built up. That's the fun of it as well. But vanity? Forget it."

Director Stephen Daldry chimes in, "I got used to Nicole spending most of her days looking like Virginia Woolf. It was much more odd talking to her without the nose. Without the nose, it was like, `Who are you? Right, you're Nicole Kidman.' It was a much easier relationship with Nicole when she was transformed."

Screenwriter David Hare, who adapted the film from Michael Cunningham's novel, and who worked with the actress when she starred in his play The Blue Room a few years ago, also prefers the nasally augmented Kidman. When he first saw her on the set, he recalls, "I didn't recognize her. And I'm afraid -- and she hates me for this -- I said, `Who is this incredibly attractive-looking woman?' I've tried to persuade her to keep the nose intact because I think it does a lot for her and could really help her career."

Kidman says, however, that the bravest thing she did was not disguising herself but taking on the role in the first place. "I just felt that I was not right for it. That was the biggest challenge, Stephen convincing me that I was right for it. I had to be bold and trust him. Just throw yourself into it. You've got to be willing to fail."

Taking bold steps is, in part, what the movie is about for its three protagonists: Woolf, trying to keep her sanity as she sits down to write Mrs. Dalloway in a stifling suburb; housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), trying to escape from 1950s domesticity; and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a Manhattan bohemian confronting an impossible relationship with an unavailable man that continues to paralyze her years later.

Those feelings of entrapment and loneliness were familiar for Kidman, who experienced them in the glare of the media spotlight during her 2001 divorce from Tom Cruise. "I just wanted to curl up in a ball and become very small. But as my mom always says, `All right, I think that's enough now.' She's waiting for me to get it out of my system."

Moore, whose Laura Brown seems like an even darker take on the repressed '50s housewife she plays in another current movie, Far from Heaven (she insists the synchronicity is just a coincidence), also knows first-hand her character's feelings. "What drew me to the character was her relationship with that little boy because it's so intense. I know what that is. I have that kind of relationship with my child [Cal, age 5]. They know, more than anything, what's going on with their mother. We can all remember, if you think about being a small child, what it feels like, how much how your mother feels affects you. If your mother's having a bad day, it's terrible for you. So that relationship is so interesting."

And though motherhood doesn't depress Moore the way it does her character, she appreciates that the movie doesn't pull punches when it comes to Laura's depression. "You don't see Laura get better. You watch her struggle with this. I liked that it was presented this way."

Despite its focus on women's feelings and relationships, the filmmakers insist that The Hours isn't a chick flick. "It isn't a women's picture because they don't all hug and say they're all wonderful," Hare says. "It isn't a celebration of women."

Daldry adds, "Feelings of entrapment, feelings of needing to transform, and the difficulties of those modes of change, the feeling of being miscast in a role or a situation that doesn't feel like your life -- that's something we all feel. It's not just necessarily about women. Men feel like that as well."

And Kidman concludes, "This is a very important film, not just for women, but for human beings, because it's about not judging too harshly the choices people make. It's about compassion. It's also about the effect of a great writer and great literature."

Fine, fine. But what about the nose? After the shoot ended, did she get to keep it? "It didn't exist. It was a different nose every day."
-- G.S.

Issue Date: January 17 - 23, 2003