Movie of The Hours

The Hours, most famous for being the film where Nicole Kidman sports a prosthetic nose - which is pretty effective actually, makes her almost unrecognisable!  The plot follows 3 women in different decades all suffering from depression - warning, this is a clue to how much of a downer the movie is, but in actual fact I really enjoyed it.  It travels through a day in each of their lives, one in which they may or may not survive...  Besides starring Nicole Kidman as writer Virginia Wolfe, it also features Julianne Moore playing a typical (and suicidal) 50s housewife and Meryl Streep as a present day publisher, with a ton of big names in the supporting cast - worth it for the talent alone in my opinion!  

This movie was an epiphany. As the main titles rolled, I told myself THE HOURS must have the best cast since IT'S A MAD, MAD, MAD, MAD WORLD -- Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, Nicole Kidman, Miranda Richardson, Claire Danes, Ed Harris, Allison Janney, Toni Collette, John C. Reilly, etc. -- and I braced myself for great performances. (The lesser-known Stephen Dillane, as Virginia Woolf's suffering husband, is especially good.) But what this film offers, above all, is great writing. David Hare's script, based on a novel by Michael Cunningham, is so brilliant on its own terms that everything else the production throws at it -- the exceptional actors, the splendid cinematography, Kidman's uncanny persona-dissolving makeup (which turns her into someone who looks slightly less like Virginia Woolf than Meryl Streep does without any makeup whatsoever), and especially the endlessly cycling, bicyling, tricycling, churning, twerning, exacerbating, lacerating, masturbating score of Philip Glass (I'm finally off the fence; he's a poseur) -- is powerless to do anything but vulgarize it. I'm not saying it's a bad movie; it's not -- but I believe the script would have gained much more in the auditorium of a reader's imagination. I haven't read the novel, so it's quite possible it's all in there.

Nicole Kidman received her 2nd Best Actress nomination and won for playing famous author Virginia Wolf in The Hours. Virginia and her husband Leonard have just moved out of London and into the country, so Virginia won't be as moody and troubled. But Virginia feels suffocated by the peacefulness of the country and is unable to connect with the people around her. Despite wearing ridiculous makeup and wearing a fake nose, Kidman is still able to deliver a very good performance as Virginia. A big plus is her voice: It's piercing and magnetic and draws us in. Her role is a bit underwritten and I think that it leans more towards supporting, but Kidman is able to make this work in her favor, by making Virginia an enigma that we want to see and know more of. The scenes with her sister are wonderful and the train scene is brilliantly executed by Kidman and we really feel an emotional connection to Virginia. So, a very good performance that is a bit underwhelming, but works overall.