The Hours

After finishing The Undoing and reading about Nicole Kidman's career, Sharon and I decided to watch The Hours. The movie received nine Academy Award nominations including Best Picture. Kidman won a Best Actress Oscar for her role in The Hours.

The Hours is a 2002 psychological drama film directed by Stephen Daldry. The screenplay by David Hare is based on Michael Cunningham's 1998 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title.

The film stars Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore and Nicole Kidman. Supporting roles are played by Ed Harris, John C. Reilly, Jeff Daniels, Allison Janney and Claire Danes.

The plot focuses on three women of different generations whose lives are interconnected by the 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. These are Clarissa Vaughan (Streep), a New Yorker preparing an award party for her AIDS-stricken long-time friend and poet, Richard (Harris) in 2001, Laura Brown (Moore), a pregnant 1950s California housewife in an unhappy marriage with a young son, and Virginia Woolf (Kidman) herself in 1920s England, who is struggling with depression and mental illness while trying to write her novel.

I was frankly surprised that Nicole Kidman won an Oscar for her role in the film. Sharon made the point that the Oscars love transformational roles; Kidman wears a prosthetic nose to look more like the novelist. Overall, it is an interesting film with a plot twist that I didn't see coming. I give it a lukewarm thumbs up.