‘The Hours’ weaves Woolf’s life, work into remarkable drama

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In theaters

THE HOURS, directed by Stephen Daldry, written by David Hare, 110 minutes, rated PG-13. Starts tonight, Railroad Square Cinema, Waterville.

In “The Hours,” Stephen Daldry’s moving adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Nicole Kidman – barely recognizable beneath a prosthetic nose that has received almost as much attention as her remarkable performance – becomes Virginia Woolf, a woman whose bouts with depression drove her to take her own life in 1941, when she wrote a suicide note to her husband Leonard (Stephen Dillane), placed a stone in her coat pocket and used the River Ouse to float away.

The movie, which was nominated Tuesday for nine Academy Awards and which Daldry (“Billy Elliott”) based on David Hare’s script, begins with Woolf’s suicide and then fades to black, shattering any formal structure to take audiences on a journey back and forward through time that will last the rest of the film.

Indeed, just as in Woolf’s 1925 novel, “Mrs. Dalloway,” on which all of this is loosely based, Daldry fragments time, drawing us into stories busily unfolding in 1951 and 2001, while also spiraling back to the days, months and years preceding Woolf’s death.

It’s the sort of movie that, in the wrong hands, could have become a conceptual nightmare, a film whose soul might have been lost in the stitching together of its many parts.

But that’s not the case. Bound by Philip Glass’ fluid, dreamlike score and Peter Boyle’s superb editing, the three stories are seamlessly interwoven with such skill and care, “The Hours” isn’t just noteworthy for its acting and storytelling, but also for its craft.

In the film, Julianne Moore is Laura Brown, a pregnant, suicidal housewife in 1951 Los Angeles who has discovered in Woolf’s “Mrs. Dalloway” the truth of her own life, which she feels she has wasted in spite of a son (Jack Rovello) and husband (John C. Reilly) who adore her.

Seeking a way out so that she is no longer the burden she feels she is to her family – as Woolf did – she tucks a bottle of pills into her purse, leaves her son with a baby sitter and rents a motel room. There, she’ll finish “Mrs. Dalloway” and perhaps, at the end of the day and in a room of her own, even her own life.

In 2001, Meryl Streep’s Clarissa Vaughn, a successful editor, has decided to throw a party for her best friend and former lover Richard (Ed Harris), a famous poet battling AIDS who is beginning to question for whom he’s living – himself or Clarissa, a woman he affectionately calls Mrs. Dalloway.

Like Woolf’s Septimus, Richard also is contemplating suicide, something Clarissa senses but which she cannot face. Instead, she immerses herself in all of the meaningless minutiae of Richard’s party and states rather grandly to her lesbian partner, Sally (Allison Janney), that she thinks she’ll buy the flowers for the party herself.

It’s a throwaway comment that recalls “Dalloway’s” famous opening line and you can’t help thinking: 80 years of women’s lib has allowed this modern Clarissa to be free with her sexuality and to enjoy a career once dominated by men, but she’s still saddled with the role of a caretaker.

Sexuality weighs heavily on “The Hours,” just as it did in Woolf’s own life and work, and it’s used as a cornerstone on which so much hinges. To be sure, love has cost everyone here deeply and the price, in the end, proves steep.

As strong as all of the performances are, Kidman, the standout, has never been better. She immerses herself so completely into her character that you sense, simply by the way she carries herself – her back slightly hunched, shoulders rounded, head tilted down, as if to shield herself from the world – that facing each day is too much for her, just as it was for Woolf.

With Kidman, Moore and Harris all scoring Academy Award nominations (Streep was overlooked, but she was nominated for her performance in “Adaptation”), “The Hours” ends with a satisfying twist that blurs the decades together and crushes time in a cathartic rush. The surprise won’t be revealed here, but if this movie is about how some choose not to live, it’s also just as much about why others choose to go on.

Grade: A

On video and DVD

8 WOMEN, written and directed by Francois Ozon, 113 minutes, rated R. In French with English subtitles.

Francois Ozon’s “8 Women” tries to make George Cukor’s 1939 catfight, “The Women,” look like a quaint Sunday prayer meeting among the best of friends. While it doesn’t quite pull that off (what could?), it has a great time trying and, in the end, it stands as a worthy homage to the unforgettable mood Cukor created in his film.

Set in the 1950s, “8 Women” is a haughty, heavy-breathing melodrama that feels like Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park” as written by Agatha Christie on a nitrous oxide drip.

The film begins with a rush of strings and trumpets from Krishna Levy’s triumphantly purple score and a glimmering curtain of crystal beads shimmering in a soft pastel hue. Both ground the movie in camp while priming the viewer for what’s to come. Certainly, you hope, that whatever is lurking beyond that curtain will be just as festooned, bejeweled and grotesque as the curtain itself.

It is. Indeed, when the beads wink apart, they reveal a huge snowbound French country estate, in which are eight famous French actresses, all of whom occasionally burst into six full-length musical numbers while playing suspects in the murder of the estate’s wealthy owner, a man found dead early on with a knife in his back.

Who did it? Take your pick. The film’s bevy of lusty, busty babes – Catherine Deneuve, Danielle Darrieux, Fanny Ardant, Isabelle Huppert, Firmine Richard, Virginie Ledoyen, Ludivine Sagnier and Emmanuelle Beart – all could be the killer. But who has the true motive? And is the film ever really what it seems?

As it becomes clear that somebody here is more clever with the cutlery than she’s letting on, the film channels everyone from Jacques Demy to Douglas Sirk, while creating the sort of Technicolor dreamworld that’s so over the top, it would have put a crease in Vincente Minnelli’s pants.

Grade: B

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, Tuesdays and Thursdays on WLBZ 2 and WCSH 6, and are archived on RottenTomatoes.com. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.

Grades of recent releases

Adaptation – A

Analyze That – B-

Antwone Fisher – A-

Auto Focus – C

Bowling for Columbine – B+

Catch Me if You Can – A-

Chicago – A

Confessions of a Dangerous Mind – C-

Die Another Day – C+

Far from Heaven – A

Gangs of New York – C

The Hot Chick – C-

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days – C

8 Mile – C

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – B+

The Hours – A

I Spy – C

Just Married – D+

Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – B

Maid in Manhattan – B-

My Big Fat Greek Wedding – A-

One Hour Photo – A-

The Pianist – A+

Punch-Drunk Love – B+

The Recruit – B

Red Dragon – B+

The Ring – C

The Santa Clause 2 – C-

Secretary – B

Shanghai Knights – B

Solaris – C+

Spirited Away – A

Standing in the Shadows of Motown – B+

Star Trek: Nemesis – B-

Treasure Planet – B-

The Trials of Henry Kissinger – B

Two Weeks Notice – C+

The Video-DVD Corner

Renting a video or a DVD? NEWS film critic Christopher Smith can help. Below are his grades of recent releases in video stores.

About a Boy ? A-

The Adventures of Pluto Nash ? F

All About Eve (remastered DVD) ? A+

Austin Powers in Goldmember ? B-

The Banger Sisters ? B

Baran ? A-

Barbershop ? B+

Big Trouble ? D

Blood Work ? B-

Blue Crush ? B+

The Bourne Identity ? B+

Brown Sugar ? C+

The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys ? B-

The Good Girl ? A-

8 Women ? B

Enigma ? C

Eight Legged Freaks ? B

Enough ? C-

Feardotcom ? F

Formula 51 ? F

Full Frontal ? D

Halloween: Resurrection ? F

Ice Age ? B

Igby Goes Down ? A

Insomnia ? A

The Importance of Being Earnest ? B-

Jason X ? Bomb

Life or Something Like It ? B-