A Handsome Adaptation

To call “The Hours” a highly pedigreed movie would be an understatement. Boasting not one but three of Hollywood’s most respected actresses, as well as director Stephen Daldry, fresh from the triumph of his critically acclaimed “Billy Elliot,” the film also features a screenplay by playwright David Hare, and music by none other than Philip Glass. It’s based on Michael Cunningham’s 1998 PEN/Faulkner award-winning novel of the same name, and its subject matter—ranging from literary leviathan Virginia Woolf, to postwar suburban angst, to a modern-day poet dying of AIDS—could not possibly be weightier. The question is: does “The Hours” live up to its blue-blooded promise?

The answer, happily, is yes. Daldry and producer Scott Rudin have crafted a fine, luminous film about the search by three women, in varying circumstances and times, for meaning in a life lived on its own terms, whatever those terms may be. Though not without its flaws, “The Hours” is a pleasu...