Star cast of 'Hours' rewards viewers after slow beginning

It seems fitting that a movie focused on people's hesitation to live hesitates itself during its first half. Despite the slow start that makes one assume "The Hours" will take excessive hours to finish, the movie gains an intensity in the second half that makes the expository nature of the first part forgivable. Set in three time periods - the '20s, the early '50s and the beginning of the 21 century - two things tie the separate stories together: Virginia Woolf's novel "Mrs. Dalloway" and Philip Glass' musical scores. The movie begins by showing the mentally unstable Woolf (Nicole Kidman) as she begins writing her latest book and then moves into the next scene by having housewife Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) reading the novel in bed, while modern-day woman Clarissa Vaughan inadvertently re-inacts the novel as she plans a party for her dying friend and established poet Richard (Ed Harris). After about 30 minutes of this gimmick that hopes to provide connection, the audience is at least clear about what director Stephen Daldry wants it to be recognized as a motif. As Daldry begins to trust his viewers, he begins letting them see rather than be told. This move is the strength of the movie and serves well Michael Cunningham's book, which "The Hours" is named after and based on. The audience watches as these women unravel and then pull themselves together in the only ways they believe it's possible. The movie is a look at what the individual knows about herself that others cannot know. After Woolf's doctors recommend she be removed to the country, she longs for the city and tells her husband, "You cannot find peace by avoiding life," which is the theme of the movie. False comforts are exactly what the name implies. Some of the movie's best moments come during the screen time of Streep and Harris as their characters struggle to live and to die, and they illustrate the dangers of living for someone else. The movie deals with other things, too, such as bisexuality, of which there is at least an undercurrent of in each woman's life, and artificial-insemenation, to which Claire Danes owes her part in the movie. With these issues, "The Hours" is able to question the correlation between womanhood, motherhood and wifedom. And in the end, the movie proves they are independent roles, roles that it is equally noble to accept or deny. Aside from Kidman's prosthetic nose, this movie only offers truth. "The Hours" is now playing at Regal Downtown West 8. Rating: B