Kidman's latest pays homage to Virginia Woolf

Director Stephen Daldry's critically lauded film "The Hours" has finally come to Bloomington. Based on the Pulitzer-prize winning novel by Michael Cunningham, it is a homage to Virginia Woolf's "Mrs. Dalloway." With three of our best actresses performing today, the pedigree nature of this film has been unquestionable nearly from its inception. \n"The Hours" tells the story of Woolf writing her most important book, and the lives of two women in two different times, whom it greatly affects. Nicole Kidman plays the self-destructing Woolf, and by now her plastic nose will probably be up for Best Performance by a Prosthetic Appendage. Julianne Moore plays a suffocating and unraveling housemom in 1940s post-War L.A. And Meryl Streep plays a lesbian publishing editor who's beginning to question the worth of her own existence.\n"The Hours" is a film that has been primarily marketed toward women. But to take this film as only applicable to women is a mistake of sexist proportions. "The Hours" deals with heavy themes: growing old, the daily routines we try to force lifelong importance on, our right to chose life or death every day and what choosing life really means. "The Hours" is ultimately about those things, those questions that have crossed the generations of humanity. Daldry is able to visually bring this theme out, if at times overbearingly so, through cutting on parallelisms occurring across the eras. \nThe lead performances in "The Hours" are unarguably three of the year's best. The film is tautly directed and worthy of its acclaim. But the film is unquestionably aware of its own self-worth, which becomes its biggest flaw. There are moments of such complete pretension in the film, that Kidman, Moore, or Streep could be reciting HTML and it would sound like The Answer to Life. There's no question which film this year is singing the Siren's song to the Oscars, but "Time" critic Richard Schikel has named "The Hours" the worst film of 2002, specifically because of this self-indulgence. While a certain amount of pretension and attention grabbing seems to be motivating such a drastic decision, there is an element of irrefutable truth. "The Hours" is a fine and important film, one that's life-affirming in the toughest way, one that is due even more acclaim still.