The Hours takes place all during a day in the lives of three women, Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, and Clarissa Vaughan. Each character in the story feels that their lives are being lived for the sake of someone else, and are confronted with a difficult choice. All of them must choose between carrying on the fallacies they currently reside in, or taking a risk and living life for themselves.

Virginia Woolf, living in a London suburb in 1923, is taking on the challenge of starting a new book, later to become her famous Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf is forced to live away from London, though she feels it is only there that she can draw truly creative energy, even if it means risking her sanity. However, she strives to carry on working in her state of misery, if only to make her worrisome husband, Leonard, pleased.

Laura Brown resides in post-World War II Los Angeles with her veteran husband and young son. The roles of housewife and mother, to which she is forced to conform because of outside societal forces, leave Brown writhing under her own skin, suffocating for a life of her own. Insecurity and a longing for something else lead her to question her role as a mother, resulting in the oxymoronic terror she feels because of the immense love she has for her son and the unborn child in her womb. Escaping from her reality, much like she did as a youth, Brown hides behind a book—Mrs. Dalloway.

Clarissa Vaughan lives in 21st century New York City, with her lover Sally, and is preparing for a party she is hosting for her friend and ex-lover Richard, a poet dying of AIDS. Vaughan lives her life for Richard, caring for him through years of degeneration caused by the virus, and pushing him to have hope in those better days. She strives to bring happiness to Richard and to others in her life, in hope of finding meaning in her own life. Vaughan is the modern day Mrs. Dalloway.

The creator of these women’s lives, Cunningham, was born in Ohio in 1952 and grew up in La Canada, Calif. getting a B.A. in English literature from Stanford, he got his M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. Using his love of Woolf, and her Mrs. Dalloway, Cunningham wrote The Hours over three years and it was published in 1998, later earning Cunningham the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1999. Sparking the interest of producer Scott Rudin and renowned playwright David Hare, Cunningham’s novel soon was on its way to becoming a full-length film.

In an interview with the author, Cunningham stated that he was thrilled with how the screen adaptation of his novel had turned out. Unlike most authors whose works go to film, Cunningham said that he did not think of The Hours as “his baby,” but as the best work he could produce at the time. When making his novel into a movie, he granted full creative rights to Hare in writing the screenplay. The result, while following the novel almost flawlessly, was a unique creation of beauty and deep meaning that could never be conveyed through pen on paper.

Taking on the three main roles, Kidman (Woolf), Moore (Brown), and Streep (Vaughan) beautifully portrayed each character, bringing each woman to life and lending something to their performances that only great actresses can. Each story was wonderfully intertwined. Where the novel used chapters, the film used creative similarities in a scene to tie them together. The best example found in both works is the line “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” This is the first line of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, and as she writes it a cut is made to Brown reading it, and then a cut to Vaughan shouting the exact line to Sally about the flowers for her party.

Not only does the film herald remarkable performances from the three leads, but it also has an amazing supporting cast, including Stephen Dillane, John C. Reilly, Ed Harris, Allison Janney, and Jeff Daniels. Additionally, composer Philip Glass provided an incredibly moving and equally emotional sound-track to accompany the film. In a sense the music in the picture is almost an individual character in itself.