The Hours 

It is an intellectual's movie, sadly I don't fall in that category. On the bright side it is a technically perfect movie - camera work, editing, makeup, music and acting - above average. Three brilliant actresses Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore have given it their best shot, not forgetting Ed Harris. From Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name, Stephen Daldry has made a good movie, if only I could understand what it was all about.


The three main characters in the movie, all of them women are tormented by some kind of agony. First there is the writer Virginia Woolf, played by Kidman, in 1920s England writing her novel Mrs.Dalloway. Then there is the 1950s house wife, who is supposedly akin to a character, Julianne Moore, depressed about I-don't-know-what and finally there is the reader, Meryl Streep in 2001 nursing her AIDS ridden friend and throwing a party after he wins a prestigious poetry award. The common thread which connects all the three women (in addition to a surprise connection which is revealed at the end) is their endless angst - the root cause of which I could not find out, expect in Streep's case which maybe becuase nursing a friend fighting a losing battle to AIDS for long years could be taxing on the nurse herself.

This is a kind of movie which is bound to be heaped with a lot of praise from the 'thinking' people, most of which the commoner like me or you would have no clue about. What do these three characters have to worry about so much so that, it drives them to suicide or fleeing their own families? What I think is that, these people have never known real worries, that leaves them plenty of time to ponder over 'non-worries' and conjure up imaginary torments and finally dish out a movie about existential angst. Ah...that favorite subject of writers and poets who have exhausted everything else, is now becoming the staple of Hollywood artsy movies?!?!!