Film Studies: How a small river in Sussex got the better of Nicole Kidman...

In Richmond, England (in alleged country calm), in the early Twenties, an agitated young woman writes out the first sentence of her novel – if that sentence still feels sound tomorrow, it can carry the book all the way home. In Los Angeles, in 1951, 10 years after the death by suicide of that novelist, a young wife and mother, Laura Brown, comes close to doing away with herself. Meanwhile in New York City, not quite now, but let's say 10 years ago, a middle-aged woman, Clarissa, is trying to put on a party to celebrate her lifelong friend, Richard Brown, for winning a prize for poetry. But Richard is very ill with AIDS and he may not survive the celebration.

Of course, it is not clear that anyone has a chance of surviving, or of doing better than the battered paperback version of Mrs Dalloway, published in 1925, and still holding. And if that leaves you more confused, and if you are coming to the conclusion that with two suicides and one near miss to its account, The Hours is not exactly your kind of movie in these melancholy times, I can only say, alas, because it is the only great film 2002 had to offer, and because in its piercingly beautiful way it is poised to offer you the closest thing to consolation possible in harder times still.

Let me put the "story" down in a different way, one that may be more palatable. The novelist, the tense woman tucked up above the river in Richmond, is Virginia Woolf, but she is Nicole Kidman, too. Not that the fun, or whatever, of being Nicole Kidman seems any longer capable of buoying up the woman, or the imagination, inside. Ms Kidman has altered her nose. She has deepened her voice and dropped a Sydney accent for Bloomsbury. But she has drawn desperation and danger into her once pretty self so that we can think her capable of that first sentence, and its triumph, and her eventual settling into the Ouse, a small river in Sussex, when torment and the undertow of Philip Glass's music are beyond resistance.

And Laura Brown, in sunny, post-war Los Angeles, when American empire was as large and round as a painted peach, is Julianne Moore. She is reading Mrs Dalloway, and she is in a kind of evident distress that her fond husband (John C Reilly) cannot notice. There is a brief, perilous passion between Laura and a neighbour (Toni Collette) as that woman waits to discover whether she has cancer. This Laura is close to ending her own life, but she cannot quite manage it. Not that anyone would think to define her plight as lacking in courage or adequate desperation.

In New York, in Manhattan, Clarissa is Meryl Streep. She has loved Richard Brown (Ed Harris) in his youth and been his lover briefly, but they went their own ways: he was homosexual, and she lives with a woman (Allison Janney) now. Still, nothing – not even her daughter – matches Clarissa's feeling for Richard, so it comes as a thoroughly weighed, deeply loving rebuke when, instead of going to her party, he simply steps out of his own window.

Yes, I've told you the "ending" (in the sense of the thing that happens last), but if you are reading carefully you have already picked up on the more profound narrative connection, or linkage. And even if you're not quite there yet, when you see the film and when you're carried along on the Ouse-like current of the Glass music, you will know it before you grasp it. Because the connections are there, like the little twists of DNA, the way desperate people brush against each other, pacing out their hours and words.

The film is directed by Stephen Daldry; it has a script adapted by David Hare from Michael Cunningham's novel – and I think it is worth saying (and Hare is himself a very good film director) that the script is more taut, more barely emotional and more trusting of the audience than the novel managed to be. This is not to diminish the remarkable novel, or its great debt to Virginia Woolf. But Hare's touch has made the film bolder, more eternal and, I think, more painful.

The cast also includes Stephen Dillane (as Leonard Woolf), Miranda Richardson (as Virginia's sister, Vanessa), Claire Danes (as Clarissa's daughter), Jeff Daniels (as one of Richard's lovers) and even Eileen Atkins – this is a fond touch, for a few years ago Ms Atkins did the screenplay for a fine film of Mrs Dalloway (with Vanessa Redgrave as the London hostess).

You may see from this list that it is as if our best actors have turned out for an all-star game. There isn't a flaw. There isn't one simple story to follow so much as our helpless instinct for seeing connections. This is a great, heartbreaking film.

d.thomson@independent.co.uk

'The Hours' is released in the UK on 14 February