The Hours

By EWAN McDONALD

(Herald rating * * *)

Towards the end of the DVD there is a trailer for another movie from the same studio, How To Lose A Guy In 10 Days. Someone more cynical than your devoted columnist might suggest that for almost half the population, this movie achieves a similar result in just under two hours. Yes, the most hardcore devotees of this tale — or, more correctly, three tales — will be women. With an interest in novels and reading. And serious movies. The Hours is probably the ultimate Chick Lit Flick.

Nicole Kidman and a prosthetic nose play Virginia Woolf, the twisted, tortured novelist working on her self-consciously stream-of-consciousness 1925 work Mrs Dalloway. This seminal work of 20th-century literature covers one day in an English middle-class housewife's life in which she has breakfast, buys flowers, prepares to throw a party, and can't cope with any/all of the above.

Woolf is so self-absorbed that she can announce with pride, "I believe I may have a firstsentence," and moments later order her cook to take a train journey of several hours to get some sugar for lunch. Feminist icon, huh?


Alongside her story, as director Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliott) adapts Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, are those of Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a housewife in middle-50s Middle America who is reading Mrs Dalloway and follows its template to try to escape from her husband, Dan (John C. Reilly), and young son; and Clarissa (Meryl Streep), neglecting her partner, Sally (Allison Janney), to throw a party to honour her ex-husband, a prize-winning writer, Richard Brown (Ed Harris).

The link between the three women will be Woolf's book and three suicide attempts, two successful (and neither of them people who have sat through the whole movie). All three stories begin with breakfast, involve preparations for parties and end in sadness.

Another link might be Hollywood's love affair with Famous Dead White Women Writers, following Kate Winslet's turn as Iris Murdoch, this Academy Award-winning outing from Kidman, and Gwyneth Paltrow's trip to Dunedin to make the Sylvia Plath story.

So you're going to be impressed by two excellent performances, from Kidman and Streep, but depressed, too. However, you might be cheered to hear that the DVD has a number of worthwhile extras.

There are two commentaries, the first from director Daldry and author Cunningham on the challenges of adapting a popular novel to the screen, and the second with Kidman, Moore and Streep, which would have been more interesting if they had been recorded at one session and not spliced together from separate interviews. Later Daldry explains his ambitions in a film-maker's introduction.

Three Women is rather better than the usual behind-the-scenes feature, with casting, rehearsal and interview snippets from the lead actors; The Mind and Times of Virginia Woolf contains historical film and interviews with contemporaries, biographers, and historians; and composer Philip Glass backgrounds his work in The Music of The Hours.

Daldry, Cunningham and screenwriter David Hare walk through the project and discuss Woolf's influence on their lives in the final feature, The Lives of Mrs Dalloway.