Hours, The MPAA Rating: PG-13 Entertainment: +4 Content: -3

Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Michael Cunningham, this romantic drama tells the respective one-day stories of three women in the 20th Century, separated by time and geography, who are linked together by a single work of literature. In London in the early 1920s, author Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman) is working on her novel, Mrs. Dalloway, about a day in the life of a troubled woman. Virginia herself has been depressed and suicidal most of her life. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore), a troubled, pregnant housewife living in Los Angeles after World War II, reads Mrs. Dalloway and discovers that she is much like the character in the book, who is unhappy with her suffocating life and contemplates ending it all. Then in present day New York, Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep) is an editor who is caring for her friend and ex-lover, Richard Brown (Ed Harris), a celebrated poet and novelist who is stricken with AIDS.

The Hours is Oscar worthy with Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep and Julianne Moore giving intense, believable portrayals of struggling women. Ed Harris deserves recognition for his sincere performance as an AIDS-stricken man who has lost all hope. The films mood is dark and depressing. Clarissa and her live-in girlfriend are involved in a lesbian relationship. Although no sexual activity is shown, there are three instances of women kissing women. While Clarissas compassion for her gay ex-lover is honorable, the moral indifference prevails. A low view of the sanctity of human life is shown in two nongraphic suicides, one when Virginia drowns herself and another when Richard throws himself out of a window. Laura also contemplates suicide. Although the acting is tremendous in this entertaining Oscar contender, the sympathetic and disturbing view of homosexuality and suicide, and the regular use of the Lords name in vain earn it a negative acceptability rating.

Preview Reviewer: Lynn Nusser
Distributor: Miramax