The Hours

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.

--Pink Floyd, "Time"

It's certainly the way of the women of The Hours. Across time, across continents, the one constant running through these characters is the desperation of their own lives. Led by director Stephen Daldry (Billy Elliot), the most stellar ensemble of the year creates a film that is no less than a masterpiece.

The Hours opens with a river, and like that river, the film flows through the lives of three women, each somehow connected through a single novel. In England in 1923, Virginia Woolf (a nearly unrecognizable Nicole Kidman) begins work on Mrs. Dalloway while struggling to deal with the life around her. In Los Angeles in 1951, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) reads Mrs. Dalloway as a way to escape the family she doesn't know how to care for. And in 2001 New York, Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep) finds herself lost as she plans a party for her AIDS-stricken friend Richard (Ed Harris), who calls her "Mrs. Dalloway" as she fits her life to the people around her.

Daldry and his editor, Peter Boyle, make it all flow together seamlessly, cutting back and forth between the three women in a stream-of-consciousness narrative that is unbelievably powerful. The most mundane of events -- the cracking of eggs, for example -- is connected through the film to reveal more and more about the characters. It's not an easy task to weave the three stories together, but the editing is perfect and never distracting. Also excellent is the haunting, beautiful score composed by Phillip Glass.

The performances are flawless. Kidman shuffles around her English cottage, puffing away on cigarettes and glaring over her nose at the servants. Whether she's watching her niece and nephews give a funeral for a dead bird or hissing her frustrations at her well-meaning husband Leonard (Stephen Dillane), Kidman perfectly captures the brooding Woolf, turning in the best performance of the year, female or otherwise. Meryl Streep is her usual dependable self, but Julianne Moore is positively heartbreaking, as she manages to turn the simple act of baking a cake into an epic struggle. Claire Danes, Jeff Daniels, Miranda Richardson, John C. Reilly, and Toni Collette are all excellent in small roles.

The Hours has moments of stunning power, scenes that stick with you long after the credits roll. One scene in particular sticks out for me. Laura drops her son off at a babysitter and heads to a motel, bottles of sleeping medication in her purse. Even she's not entirely certain what she's going to do. This is intercut with Virginia confessing to her niece that she may have to kill off her own heroine. Back in the hotel, Laura lies on the bed, the bottles on the dresser next to her, her eyes vacant...and suddenly water fills the room, flowing upwards, covering her completely. The film immediately cuts back to Virginia, with the audience as choked and breathless as Laura. It's a haunting piece of filmmaking, one that's impossible to forget (and I'm fully aware that this limp description does the scene no justice at all).

I know that I said About Schmidt was the best film of 2002, but I've changed my mind. The Hours is one of the most gut-wrenching films I've seen, a complex, emotional masterpiece that is the easy choice to take Best Picture. It's perfectly acted, directed, written, and edited -- a pure, flawless masterpiece.

Rating: *****