The Hours

When director Stephen Daldry’s follow-up to the much lionised Billy Elliot opens in Sussex, 1941 with the words ‘Dearest, I feel certain I am going mad again’, it should become abundantly clear that you’re in for two hours of premium chick angst.

Of course, this is to be entirely expected in a film where the figure of tortured literary heroine Virginia Woolf, played here by Nicole Kidman, is pivotal.

Much has been made of the former Mrs. Cruise’s physical transformation for the role, an effect enabled not so much by a small prosthetic attachment to her nose, as by her shockingly school-marmish mouth. Whoever could’ve guessed that beneath her usual layers of Hollywood-grade, industrial-strength lipstick lurked the meanly proportioned lips of a spinsterish, no-mates librarian?

Mirroring Woolf’s literary output, the film’s narrative is fractured between three time periods and three characters: Woolf herself, as she struggles with mental illness and the writing of Mrs. Dalloway; a modern day literary socialite (Streep); and a repressed 1950s housewife (Moore) suffocated by domesticity despite the generous warmth of her husband and son.

As one might expect, the proceedings are highly performance-driven, but it’s Julianne Moore’s tormented turn which steals the show, and grants a heartbreaking humanity to a character whose actions are morally reprehensible.

For all the quality thespian action and Oscar buzz though, the film doesn’t really go anywhere, and like the source novel by Michael Cunningham, the character of Woolf herself is not fleshed out to a satisfactory degree, leaving a considerable void at the very heart of the piece.

In fairness, Woolf’s life doesn’t lend itself easily to drama – her madness was never as all-consuming as Dickinson’s and her capitulation was not as dramatic as Plath’s, but that’s of little consolation to the viewer who must struggle with the film’s consequently uneven storylines.

Still, there’s little argument that this is a well-scripted and performed affair, even if it is a bigger mope-fest than the entire front-row at a Radiohead concert.