By: Suzanne Baran

It is through time and the passage of three lives that British stage director Stephen Daldry, whose only other film was Billy Elliot, makes his mark . The script, by David Hare, was adapted from Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1998 novel of the same title.
                                                                                                                    The plot weaves the audience into a universe which is as biting as the book. Virginia Woolf's novel Mrs. Dalloway is used to connect Woolf in 1923 and 1941 with the same events of beleaguered women in 1951 and 2001. The movie flashes back and forth through different time periods to tell each woman’s story. The Hours forms a 75-year-long line of women seduced by the all-enveloping tender lure of lesbianism, which eventually culminates in Woolf’s self-murder.

Woolf, played by Oscar winner Nicole Kidman, portrays an austere yet anxiety-ridden Englishwoman coping with a heavy dose of depression. A beam of light filters through her dank sitting room, and she rises from her saddened state by writing the first line of Mrs. Dalloway.

In the next blink, it’s 1951, and Laura Brown, Julianne Moore, is pregnant and belabored. She is reading Mrs. Dalloway for comfort. Laura is a housewife who sports conservative "Leave it to Beaver" dresses and watches her son while her husband, John C. Reilly, is working at a "real" job. Laura is eager to be the best wife and mother, but she is burdened by it. She pushes herself to bake her husband a cake for his birthday but she’s mentally taxed by the task.

Finally, modern times flash across the screen headed by New Yorker and book editor Clarissa, Meryl Streep, whose friends actually refer to her as Mrs. Dalloway.She concerns herself with the social graces of Manhattan’s literate elites. At the same time, she is organizing a party for her ex-lover Richard, Ed Harris, to celebrate his esteemed poetry prize. Instead, Richard chooses to isolate himself through his last stages of AIDS. Similarly, the novel, Mrs. Dalloway, describes a day in the life of a severely depressed woman whose English lifestyle represents complacency, devoid of any sort of challenge.

It is as if Woolf had a crystal ball into the minds and hearts of future generations of women—she could prognosticate their oppression of tending to their homes. These same women would feel invalidated by their domestic duties, lugging them into a life of purposelessness. Women—Woolf asserted through text—would always live in the shadow of men.

And so each personal struggle begins. All three women grapple with life and death, and sexuality. Through it all, suicide is portrayed as a valiant act, one that is not just a temporary solution to a permanent problem, but it’s an act that displays courage. The manner in which these women contemplate suicide pronounces their intense suffering, and they dwell on the impact it will have on those around them. While this is seemingly typical of most suicidal people, Woolf goes one step further. Her protagonist must die so others can value life. She sees her death as the ultimate sacrifice.

But Harris dies to shorten his inevitable end, and, quite possibly, to free Streep of her obligation to care for him. Moore contemplates death while pregnant – but decides against it.

The film’s most poetic and harrowing scene occurs while Moore checks into a hotel, holding pills in one hand and Woolf’s novel in the other. At that moment, the water from the river where Woolf drowned herself envelops Moore, rising from under the bed.

Another gripping scene seizes the audience when Harris’s former lover arrives at Streep’s home while she in the throes of party preparations. She allows herself to admit she’s "unraveling," submits to her grief, loss and downright purposelessness now that her friend is dead. This is Streep’s shining moment—she delivers an Oscar-worthy performance.

The Hours is as bleak as its subject matter. The pace, tone, and feel of the film inspire depression in a way no other film has with the exception of Holocaust films. But Daldry gives and he takes. He saps the audience of feeling the same entertainment more upbeat films provide. His characters are so drab that while watching them one feels as distant from them as they do from life. But he rewards the viewers by delving into subject matter that most films avoid.