Three Different Eras. Three Different Women. Each Connected by the Lies They Tell.

Meryl Streep for a long time has been my favourite actress and here is why. Whatever role she goes into, she gives it such ambition and such passion that it becomes reality. Her performance in The Hours is one I will never forget. She is a woman in 2001 who is in love with her best friend, dying of AIDS and who just wants to give up. Julianne Moore is in 1951 reading Mrs. Dalloway and realising how the life she is living is not hers to live. Nicole Kidman is Virginia Woolf, struggling with her sexuality as well as life itself, having tried to commit suicide twice whilst writing Mrs Dalloway she is a tormented woman who believes that death is the path for her. The film is told through one day in each of their lives and how this one day changes the lives they lead forever.
I found Julianne Moore's performance irritating and pathetic, Kidman won an Oscar for her performance and although fantastic it is nothing in comparison to Streep's.
Woolf questions her life in this film, how did she end up in Richmond? Why is she living this life? Do at some point we all sit back and think how did this happen? Is this the life you had planned? Woolf believes that her life had been stolen from her, that this life she is living is not hers at all,  but what she was given. Are we given a life or do we make our own choices? Does one bad choice lead to a life we no longer wish to live? Isn't it funny to think that one day you will look over your life and wonder if there was anything you would have changed? Regret is a terrible thing yet if you do not regret, are you being honest with yourself? Nobody can be happy with every part of their life, there is always that desire or desperation to achieve more. Or is there such a thing as a perfect existence?
This film is brilliant, telling the story of a woman's whole life in a single day. Just one day. And in that day her whole life.
I do believe that Woolf loved her husband, he was only after her best interests but after two sucide attempts , he didn't trust that she knew what was best for her. But Woolf is like a the wind, she can never be captured, she is and always should be free. As 'how can you find peace by avoiding life?'
When Virginia Woolf killed herself she wrote to her husband saying that she does not believe that anyone could have been happier than they have been together. She also wrote: 'Dear Leonard. To look life in the face, always, to look life in the face and to know it for what it is. At last to know it, to love it for what it is, and then, to put it away. Leonard, always the years between us, always the years. Always the love. Always the hours.'