Since I’m interested in movies and TV series, I was curious about The Hours’ cinematographic transposition: I think that the result was good because of two main points.

First of all, many movies inspired by novels often betray the original work’s spirit or simply do not follow correctly their original content, and this very often leads to bad results if compared to the books’ standards. But this is not the case. The novel is focused on the inner side of the characters’ selves and psychological analysis and this is hard to convey in a movie, but the high-level cast fully succeeded in this. N. Kidman and M. Streep’s performances are great, and even Ed Harris, an actor I have always known for the “bad guy” parts in action or war movies (like “A History Of Violence” and “Enemy At The Gates”), proves to be a very versatile and skilled actor playing Richard’s part.

Secondly, I focused on the soundtrack during the vision, and this happens rarely to me when I watch a movie. There are mostly songs with only a piano, and in my opinion the compositions are elegant and intimate but also recurring and repetitive, as if they had to express “the hours” and chronological time itself. In fact, it is one of the most fitting soundtracks I have ever heard, along with other masterpieces like Ennio Morricone’s ones in Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns (even if in a completely different way).

To sum up, I did not liked Cunningham’s novel so I was not expecting a great movie at all, but I have to admit that “The Hours” is one of the most faithful and successful adaptations of a literary opera on the screen that I have ever seen.