The Hours

Smart, sophisticated, stimulating... Zzzz

It's hardly surprising that Stephen Daldry's The Hours has grabbed its share of Academy Award nominations. What makes the film a natural, and worthy, Oscar contender is that it's an American studio production with emotional and intellectual ambitions, but a certain European reserve too. It doesn't twist your arm too much for tears and smiles, and that's something coming from the director of the grotesquely manipulative Billy Elliot. The Michael Cunningham novel that it's based on has plenty of dramatic buttons that Daldry could have jammed full-on if he had wanted: Aids, loneliness, lost youth, female sexuality, mothers and children, and the suicide of Virginia Woolf. No wonder that The Hours finally seems, for all its post-modern fragmentation, like a reassuringly old-fashioned melodrama at heart.

Beginning with Woolf's watery demise, the film backtracks to interlace three parallel stories. In Richmond in 1923, the novelist (Nicole Kidman) is beginning to write Mrs Dalloway, and driving all around her to distraction. In 1951 Los Angeles, Laura (Julianne Moore) takes refuge in her reading of Woolf's book, while her perfect suburban life as wife, mother and cake-maker crumbles beneath her. And in 2001, Meryl Streep's arty Manhattanite organises a party for her friend and ex-lover (Ed Harris), a poet with Aids who dubs her "Mrs Dalloway" after Woolf's own Clarissa.

Cunningham organises the three stories in separate chapters, and it's only at the end that you realise there are other links between them than Mrs Dalloway as their shared subtext. David Hare's screenplay intersperses slivers of the three lives from the start, making the parallels clearer: as Woolf chews her pencil, Daldry cuts to Laura or the modern Clarissa, as if the novelist were writing the lives of the two other characters. Sometimes the parallels are mechanical: the three women's alarm clocks all go off at once, or one grabs a vase and another plonks in the flowers.

The film doesn't have a single clear centre, but it does have an evident weak spot, and that is Kidman's performance. Whether or not you imagine Virginia Woolf might have been like this is beside the point; so is the preposterous false nose that, try as you might to ignore it, has a way of jutting into your consciousness. The problem is that Kidman seems constantly out to spook the camera, as if she's forever slyly peeking out from behind the make-up to see if we've guessed it's her. Half the time, her Woolf – lost in deep thought, chewing her pencil, muttering the first lines of her novel to herself – comes across as an even more damaged sister to Ralph Fiennes's Spider; elsewhere, she's dispensing awkwardly modern moues of contemptuous irony. It's as unsatisfactory an impersonation of the troubled inner life as Russell Crowe's in A Beautiful Mind.

She looks all the more awkward when compared to the other two leads. We've come to expect perfect tuning from Julianne Moore: what's superb about her here is that, while Laura's dilemma could have fuelled overstatement, Moore shows commanding reserve. Laura expresses much of her pain as hesitancy; you believe her agony is all the more likely to spill over because she doesn't let it, at least not visibly. Daldry does the spilling-over for her instead, in a brief but jarring dream image that he really should have thought twice about.

But Meryl Streep – you don't expect surprises from her these days, not since her protean virtuosity became Hollywood's biggest in-joke. But her Clarissa is not only intelligent and energetic, it's also close to whom you imagine Streep might actually be – you feel she's letting her hair down, testing her own actressy habits. At first, as Clarissa bustles around being ebullient, she seems appallingly precious and complacent; gradually, as she starts to break gently down, you find yourself regretting that Streep never got to work with Ingmar Bergman.

I could go on just listing good performances, as there are almost too many than is decent: John C Reilly, Toni Collette, an effervescent Claire Danes, Miranda Richardson's light, economical Vanessa Bell... Only Ed Harris's poet, at the end of his Aids-related tether, is hard to take: it's too obviously a virtuoso part, designed to stop our hearts and the show. This stream of star walk-ons is a little disconcerting: you almost wonder when New York Clarissa will bump into Jerry Seinfeld in the deli. But they also boost the film's theatrical structure. In Billy Elliot, Daldry seemed over-keen to hide his stage roots, but here he recognises that theatrical effects are his and Hare's forte. The film is at its best when you're effectively watching two actors share a stage: it's when Daldry throws in the sort of distraction that cranks up the budget but not the drama that you sense a theatre imagination trying to give us a little bit of cinema: moody shots in a lift shaft, Moore weaving through 1950s LA traffic.

Visually, what impressed me most of all is everyone's skin. The Kidman conk notwithstanding, the make-up department have done an extraordinary job with facial textures, and cinematographer Seamus McGarvey catches people's different lights just so: Collette's unnatural peachy gold, Streep's drained waxiness, Dillane's look of a man woven out of distressed tweed. The creation of Harris's flaking, harrowed surface is a dramatic essay in itself.

If all this reads like a list of likes and dislikes, that's because of the film's diversity, its odd sense of one thing coming after another – which, after all, could be said of Mrs Dalloway itself. It all makes for a film that cannot possibly bore you, but that's where it finally feels a little too calculated – a little self-congratulatory in its determination to entertain and stimulate, while commenting on humanity, madness, art, the condition of western 20th-century women (there's no surer way of signposting upmarket classiness than drenching a film in an oppressively solemn Philip Glass score). Of course, we all say thank God for a Hollywood movie with a bit of intelligence, a bit of literary sensibility; and of course, that's what we're meant to say. Nothing wrong with that, but – and I know it's going to sound snobbish – this is a bit of a book group movie.

j.romney@independent.co.uk