Based on an artful and intricate Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Cunningham, "The Hours," as both a screenplay and a motion picture, has a lot to live up to. Director Stephen Daldry's first step in the right direction was the decision to cast three of Hollywood's most talented actresses -- Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep -- in leading roles, which did justice to the complexity of the original characters and for Kidman and Moore especially, superceded many of their previous performances. Casting however is only half the battle of animating a novel, which simultaneously explores the thought, sentiment and temporally transcendent interrelation of three troubled women. The film attempts to span in one day the dramatic product of three lifetimes, exposing both the audience and the characters to bitter depths of stowed away sorrow and confusion.

Each woman reveals the accumulation of her lifetime in the subtlety of everyday chores. Virginia Woolf (Nicole Kidman), the tragic heroine from 1923, introduces the film and the film's study of misery in the midst of her suicide. Aptly, the repetition of the scene in the end functions to relieve suffering rather than to stir it.

Of the three characters, Woolf's existence is the most obvious depiction of unhappiness due to the blaring and dominating presence of her mental illness. Moving forward in time, Laura Brown of the '50s (Julianne Moore) depicts the extremes of depression against the background of superficially fulfilling daily chores. While she too flirts with suicide, it is her attempt to bake a cake that more thoroughly reveals the misery of her character.

Lastly, Clarissa (Meryl Streep), the modern day spin-off of Woolf's character Mrs. Dalloway, poses the greatest artistic challenge by experiencing a nervous breakdown during the course of the movie rather than being introduced within its confines.

While the 24-hour parameters promise uninteresting events, the exposure of the women's psyches is anything but subtle. Unlike similar day-in-a-life movies which balance a reality of character with their everyday existence, the women of the Hours are not meant to represent a realistic demographic, but to animate the build-up of and surrender to misery.

Being only an instrument of film's embodiment of hidden unhappiness, the individual characters of Kidman, Moore and Streep are only a secondary consideration to their collective experience. Daldry attempts to interweave their lives by the fluid and rapid travel through time, bridging decades of distance between brief and conveniently similar portions of the women's lives.

Although the scenes were carried far by the caliber of acting and cinematography, the transitions were often awkward and predictable. While the capture and juxtaposition of the women's eerily parallel behavior was visually satisfying, it presented the directorial goal of character comparison with insufficient subtlety and tact. The prying eyes of the camera often zoomed in on the tender expression of misery so intensely that the proper expression of audience sympathy was jerked out of them, rather than inspired.

That the movie stirred pity is a testament to the trite tear-jerking strategy, which often defines the so called "chick flick." More over, the nature of the extracted emotion reflects more on the maudlin soundtrack and dramatic monologues than on the overarching theme of the novel -- the dynamic progression of time as a medium of life is, for some, not a journey but an interminable arrival at dissappointment.