The Hours : Michael Cunningham

Take me with you. I want a doomed love. I want streets at night, wind and rain, no one wondering where I am.

I’m sorry”, Louis says.
“It’s all right. For god’s sake, look at all that’s happened”
“I feel like such an asshole” He stands and walks to the French doors (seven steps) Through his tears he can see the moss in the low stone troughs, the bronze platter of clear water on which floats a single white feather. He can’t tell why he’sd crying. He’s back in New York.He seems to be crying over this odd garden, Richard’s illness (why was Louis spared?), this room with Clarissa in ir, everything. He seems to be crying over a Hunter who only resembles the actual one. THis other HUnter has a fierce and tragic grandeur, true intelligence, a modest turn of mind. Louis weeps for him.
Clarisa follows. It’s all right, she says again.

The Hours is a 2002 British-American drama film directed by Stephen Daldry, and starring Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, Julianne Moore, and Ed Harris. The screenplay by David Hare is based on Michael Cunningham’s 1999 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel of the same title.

The plot focuses on three women of different generations whose lives are interconnected by the novel Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf. These are Clarissa Vaughan (Streep), a New Yorker preparing an award party for her AIDS-stricken long-time friend and poet, Richard (Harris) in 2001; Laura Brown (Moore), a pregnant 1950s California housewife with a young boy and an unhappy marriage; and Virginia Woolf (Kidman) herself in 1920s England, who is struggling with depression and mental illness while trying to write her novel.

With the exception of the opening and final scenes, which depict the 1941 suicide by drowning of Virginia Woolf in the River Ouse, the action takes place within the span of a single day in three different years and alternates between them throughout the film. In 1923, Virginia has begun writing the book Mrs Dalloway in her home in the town ofRichmond outside London. In 1951, troubled Los Angeles housewife Laura Brown escapes from her conventional life by reading Mrs Dalloway. In 2001, New YorkerClarissa Vaughan is the embodiment of the novel’s title character, as she spends the day preparing for a party she is hosting in honor of her former lover and friend Richard, a poet and author living with AIDS who is to receive a major literary award. Richard tells Clarissa he has stayed alive for her sake, and the award is meaningless because he didn’t get it sooner, until he was on the brink of death.