The Hours

In a suburb of London in the early 1920's, Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is battling insanity as she begins to write her first great novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a wife and mother in Los Angeles at the end of World War II, is reading Mrs. Dalloway, and finding it so revelatory that she begins to consider making a devastating change in her life. Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep), a contemporary version of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, lives in New York City today, and is in love with her friend Richard (Ed Harris), a brilliant poet who is dying of AIDS. Their stories intertwine, and finally come together in a surprising, transcendent moment of shared recognition.