'The Hours' (Stephen Daldry, 2002)

Title: 'The Hours'

Release Year: 2002

Director: Stephen Daldry

Cast: Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, Meryl Streep, Stephen Dillane, Miranda Richardson, John C. Reilly, Toni Collette, Ed Harris.

Plot: 'The Hours' connects the story of three different women living in three different ages with the novel 'Mrs. Dalloway'. In the early 1920s, we find its troubled writer Virginia Woolf. In the 1950s, Laura Brown reads it as she questions herself what she is going to do with her life. While preparing a party in honor of her friend Richard's career (of whom she takes care because he's ill with AIDS), Clarissa Vaughan embodies the perfect Mrs. Dalloway as her entire world crumbles around her.

Review: 'The Hours' is one of my favorite movies. It features a cast at its best, a wonderful script and the perfect score to achieve a work of art, a proof that the late 1990s and early 2000s were golden years for now respectable actors.

On the one hand, Nicole Kidman delivers a raw, powerful performance with a wide range of emotions, from rage to the most absolute desolation. Kidman embodies a mortified and caged Virginia Woolf who tries to escape the daily excrutiating routine that both her husband and the doctors that treat her force her to follow. As she says in the following scene (executed to perfection and one of the finest interpretative showcases that Kidman has had to the date), trapped in a quietness that she can bear, she's slowly dying, desperate to return to London even if that threatens her unstable mind:

In a time when, having the whole package (a mentally ill woman), she had no freedom, Nicole Kidman's Virginia Woolf claimed for the 'rights of every human being' when she said to her husband that she would rather be dead than be left in a town where she was already dying

On the other hand, we find Julianne More, a depressive housewive that has realized that having everything a woman would ask for at that time, she's terribly unhappy. Through the movie she tries to commit suicide, but stops in the last moment, being unable to kill her unborn child with her. Instead, she waits until he's born and then, she abandons her family.

Choosing Life: An old Laura Brown (Moore) tells Meryl Streep how she left her family

Which leads us to the last part. In the present, Clarissa Vaughan prepares a party for her friend Richard... Laura Brown's son, who lives his days remembering the past as AIDS consumes him. Ed Harris nails his inspiring yet depressive role, but it's Streep who gets most of the screentime. And somehow she tries to make a powerful performance too hard, slightly overacting and breaking the beautiful quietness of the film. She's very committed to her role and you can't help feeling sorry for her character when although she tries to put every piece of her life together, everything falls apart,  but she would have been better as a mere spectator, because when others take the lead, 'The Hours' creates wonderful scenes:

After a whole day preparing the party for her friend, Clarissa arrives at Richard's house to discover that the memories of his past have dragged him to his lowest yet most lucid state... ultimately killing himself

And this way, 'The Hours' reaches the end of its life. Literally. As the film concludes, we witness Woolf's suicide, as she says goodbye to her husband in a heartfelt letter. Closing a film that describes the inner devils of people's life and how inexplicable sadness can cage people into depressive states of mind, both the opening and the ending recreate the same scene (cut in two); Virginia's farewell.

'Dear Leonard...': Virginia Woolf says goodbye to her daily torture of voices and nightmares, as she also says goodbye to her beloved husband