Intermission: 'The Hours' weaves three tales into one of the year's best films

Jim Wunderle is a Springfield free-lance writer and musician.

"Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself."

This is the opening line of Virginia Woolf's novel, "Mrs. Dalloway," and a line that intersects the three time frames in which the trio of tales making up "The Hours" exist.

In 1925, we see Woolf (an unrecognizable Nicole Kidman) struggling to create the opening of her latest novel. In 1951, Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) has just started reading the book, and in 2001, Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) announces the same verbiage to her roommate as she heads out to get flowers and other things for the big party she is throwing that evening for poet Richard Brown. Richard is Clarissa's ex-lover and is dying of AIDS.

Two of these three intertwining tales will physically come together in the devastating final act, and the third holds the film together throughout. Director Stephen Daldry ("Billy Elliot") has faultlessly executed a unique narrative form adapted for the screen from Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning book.

"The Hours" actually begins in March 1941, as Woolf calmly writes a note to the husband she loves dearly, fills her pockets with stones and drowns in the Ouse River near her home in Sussex, England. This is but one of the suicides and near suicides that are focal points in "The Hours," a film that will never be described as "the feel-good hit of the season."

The main story here begins with the characters in all three time frames having breakfast. Woolf has decided to go without breakfast and retires to the "room of her own" to work on the novel.

Laura, in the 1950s, makes breakfast for her son and a husband who is entirely crazy about her. He's so blinded by his love for Laura he does not even notice the fact that she lives in constant and utter anguish and has no love for him or their young son. She tries, at times, to make the best of it and has decided today to bake a cake for her husband's birthday. In the course of the day, a neighbor (Toni Collette) comes by to say she's going into the hospital to have a lump removed from her uterus. In a touching, emotional scene, it's suggested that maybe Laura would have been happier had she chosen a different outlet for her sexuality.

This theme runs throughout "The Hours," and indeed flowed through the "Mrs. Dalloway" story and through Woolf's life as well. It's now known that the author was bisexual, and that reality infused much of her work. Daldry is not gratuitous in his sexual portrayals here, and the theme is integral to the main story.

In 2001, Clarissa goes shopping for flowers for her party and then drops in to see the guest of honor, her ex-husband Richard, who is about to receive a lifetime achievement award for his body of poetry. Richard, somewhat bitter and cynical and in the final stages of AIDS, believes he would not be getting this award if not for his illness.

Clarissa constantly tries to put the most pleasant of spins on the situation until, in one of several emotionally charged scenes, Richard wonders aloud if the only reason he is staying alive is to make Clarissa happy. It's heavy baggage here, and Ed Harris as Richard rises to the task. He's obviously lost some weight for this role and looks quite ill.

There are a number of scenes that begin in one time frame and switch to one of the other times without a glitch.

In 1925, Woolf struggles with her novel, which would eventually be recognized as her first truly great work, as well as the demons that torment her soul. By this time in her life she has attempted suicide on several occasions, and her loving husband, literary critic and publisher Leonard Woolf, keeps a watchful eye on his wife at all times.

Woolf loves this man, but her inner demons are too strong to be conquered by love, and the underlying malaise we sense in the author permeates the other lead women in "The Hours."

Woolf herself was a devout feminist, and the characters here are all cut from the same cloth. Feminism and sexual identity are examined in the England of the 1920s, the America of the 1950s and in the context of the last few years. It stands to reason that Clarissa, the heroine of the story taking place in the modern day, should be the best adjusted, as societal mores have progressed a lot in the past 50 years.

In the end, two of these time frames intersect. Which two, and the way they conjoin, will be left for the viewer to experience.

"The Hours" is a serious film, dealing with many serious issues and will not suit everyone's tastes. Fans of Woolf and those who enjoy a decidedly literary bent to their movies will find this film to be one of the most satisfying of the past year.