..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

The Hours
Directed by: Stephen Daldry

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“I seem to have fallen out of time,” one of the three interleaved heroines of The Hours says, and the great accomplishment of this rich, civil movie, directed by Stephen Daldry from David Hare’s adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, is its ability to move in and out of time without ever becoming precious, always in a delirious present tense. (Cinema, the invention without a future, August Lumiere said. Without a future tense.)

The surge of Philip Glass’ score impels us to consider their sorrows as one, another note of dark beauty against the great young cinematographer Seamus McGarvey’s startling work, luminosity of many transformations. “False comfort” is something another of the three cautions against. Three women, each on a single day in their lives. The trio includes a writer, Virginia Woolf, played by Nicole Kidman, who hides behind an exaggerated proboscis, yet etches a performance of sage delicacy. A reader: Julianne Moore’s Laura Brown, a 1950s housewife who cannot understand her feelings—like Woolf, tides of depression—and the need to maintain the façade of normalcy. And a namesake: Clarissa (Meryl Streep), a contemporary Manhattan book editor, surrounded by privilege, in a passionless long-term lesbian relationship, nicknamed Mrs. Dalloway by her dying once-lover Richard (Ed Harris). She mutters a line from the novel as she goes to buy flowers.  The precision of Streep’s disarray is awe-inspiring, a physical performance of noteworthy intensity. But there is intensity to spare.

A few impressions: Laura Brown cannot take the crushing feelings that have no name, her small boy watches, his gleaming child face also uncomprehending, his numinous eyes accusing her. Laura considers leaving, or worse. She bakes a cake. When it is done, the kitchen is exquisite, supernally clean. In order, all is amiss. And Laura’s words after she refuses her first attempt at betrayal, driver telling her small passenger: “I love you, sweetheart, you’re my guy.” Moore, in that moment, gives the most heart-wrenching shred of performance I’ve seen this year.

Toni Collette, as her glib neighbor and friend, has her own instant of perfection, glimpsing a copy of Mrs. Dalloway and flouncing across the kitchen toward it, exclaiming shinily, “Oh! You’re reading a book!” (Collette’s brief, outstanding role is surely Oscar-bound.)

In the Virginia Woolf portion, her sister’s children find a dead bird and make a bed of grass for it. She places her head beside it, and from Woolf’s point-of-view, the dead black bird, a glassy-eyed study pinioned between the petals of a yellow rose to the left, an orange rose to the right. At first glimpse, the image seems studied, and of course it is: the writer studies the world, this small emblem of passed life. And in the New York portion, one detail: The quiet yet shattered jingle of Clarissa’s masses of protective bangles at each wrist. “You cannot find peace by avoiding life, Leonard,” Woolf tells her husband. “I took the Xanax and Ritalin together. It never occurred to me!” the dying Richard says. Between these extremes, The Hours.

-- by Ray Pride