I did not expect The Hours to be this good. Nicole Kidman plays Virginia Woolf, none of whose work I had to read in high school, Julianne Moore a 1950′s housewife, and Meryl Streep a 21st century lesbian poet. That sounds like a bad T-Rex song, but bear with me.

The movie runs three parallel plots, jumping in and out of all three until the end. Virginia Woolf, in her manic-depressive self, writes her famous Mrs. Dalloway while Moore’s character is inspired by it to attempt suicide, while Streep’s character is somewhat of a real-life version of Mrs. Dalloway. As always I’m going to stop myself here before I bore myself describing the plotlines, but the movie is chalk-full of metaphors, parallelisms and concurrent motifs – it is a great thinking movie. Every line is painfully meaningful, and when the movie finished I had to devote a good amount of time just thinking about all the elements. It is a wonderful refreshment for all of us who feel like we were forced into lives quite different from our desires; obligations and responsibilities that the adult life represents. In the face of death, one can appreciate life so much more, and the themes are well-contrasted in the three plotlines, each in its own social frame.

I forgot all about Nicole Kidman winning an Oscar for her role in this, but all acting in this film is superb. All the requirements of a great movie are there: script, acting, cinematography, and score. The eerie, Danny-Elfmanish music runs consistently through all three plotlines, and gives otherwise neutral images a somber air. A must see, and I’m glad I got to.