THE HOURS (2002). Based on Michael Cunningham's 1998 novel, which in turn was inspired by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Stephen Daldry's film 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: Woolf breaks free of the isolation of the lifeless London suburb to which husband Leonard has exiled them in order to preserve her tenuous mental health; Laura confronts the feeling that she's trapped in a domestic life; Clarissa recognizes 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. 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. And Kidman, who's made a career out of charismatic portrayals of often unlikable characters (from To Die For to last year's The Birthday Girl) 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. (120m)

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